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Gary Black Reveals Why Tesla Could Fall Behind Robotaxi Rivals: 'An Army Of Unknown Cheerleaders…'

Benzinga · 6d ago

Investor Gary Black, managing director of the Future Fund LLC, has revealed why he thinks Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) could fall behind its rivals in the Robotaxi race as the EV giant fails to achieve CEO Elon Musk's end-of-the-year goal for driverless operations.

Check out the current price of TSLA here.

Marketing Muscle Needed, Says Gary Black

In a post on X on Saturday, the investor shared that bullish analysts would dismiss Tesla's declining deliveries, which were down 16% YoY in Q4, arguing that the EV giant wasn't just a car company.

However, Black shared that Tesla's future involves "selling unsupervised autonomy and humanoid robots," which, without "marketing muscle," would risk the company falling behind rivals like Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU), all of whom are a part of the Robotaxi race.

"Clearly $TSLA needs broad marketing and comms skills to differentiate their products in what is already a crowded space for autonomous ride hailing," Black said. It’s worth noting that Tesla heavily relies on CEO Musk’s relevance on social media and in pop culture to market its products.

He added that Robotics, too, would become a crowded space once manufacturers solve autonomy to build robots that would "make consumers breakfast, tend to their lawns, go to the grocery store, feed their pets," Black said.

The investor also criticized Tesla for relying on "word-of-mouth advertising from an army of unknown cheerleaders on X and YouTube," terming it less than ideal if Tesla wants to sell products to the masses.

Tesla's Robotaxi Pursuits, Musk's Share Donations

The news comes as Tesla is carrying out tests of its autonomous driving technology and Robotaxi. Recently, Musk claimed he was driven around autonomously in a Model Y Robotaxi in Austin.

A prototype of the Cybercab was also spotted in the city. Tesla is also going to ramp up production of the Cybercab this year, which was confirmed by Musk on a thread on the social media platform X recently.

Recently, Musk also donated more than 210,000 of the EV giant’s shares, which totaled close to $100 million, according to a recent SEC filing. The billionaire also claimed that the amount of taxes he paid broke the IRS system.

Tesla scores well on the Momentum and Quality metrics, but offers poor Value. It also has a favorable price trend in the Short, Medium and Long term. For more such insights, sign up for Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings today!

Price Action: TSLA surged 0.78% to $441.49 during the after-hours trading session on Friday after slipping 2.59% to $438.07 at Market close.

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