Tesla has 'a big question mark' around it right now: Analyst

Shares of Tesla (TSLA) are moving higher on Wednesday morning, despite its first-quarter report missing out on Wall Street estimates, after CEO Elon Musk commented on the future of affordable EV options in the company's earnings call. During the call, Musk signaled a shift for the company to focus more on AI.

Oppenheimer Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst Colin Rusch joins The Morning Brief to discuss Tesla's first-quarter earnings results and the current status of Tesla's operations with its products.

Rusch offers insight into Tesla's current efforts with AI: "Obviously, he promise of Tesla being the leader in AI for the physical world is, I think, very compelling and one that we think is real over time. How that translates into financials is really a big question mark right now and with the Model 2 or this low-cost vehicle, we don't know where the price point is going to be, what the cost structure is going to be. And so we think there's maybe another one or two numbers costs before we start to see things inflect higher.

He continues with: "From an execution period, I think they're going into a challenging period. They've made a bet that the learning cycles on their neural net will accelerate here between now and August, and they'll continue to improve the functionality on the FSD [full-self driving capabilities], and we think that's not a certainty, there's a lot of debugging that has to happen and a lot of work to get that moving in the right direction at the pace that they're talking about."

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This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino