Investing // Updated: September 11, 2026 // 10 min read // Lindsey A. Kennedy, Senior Technical Writer
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) closed at $367.22 on September 10, 2026, giving the company a market cap of roughly $1.45 trillion and a trailing P/E ratio above 340. Over the past year the stock has swung between $297.38 and $498.83 as investors argue over how much of Tesla's value should come from car sales versus robotaxis and robots. Twelve-month Wall Street price targets currently range from $25 to $600 — one of the widest analyst spreads of any large-cap stock — with a consensus sitting near $410–$425.
| ⚡ TL;DR — Quick Answer Current price: around $367 (Sept 10, 2026 close), down about 26% from the all-time closing high of $489.88 set on December 16, 2025. Q2 2026 earnings: record $28.24B revenue beat estimates, but adjusted EPS of $0.33 missed the ~$0.53 consensus by roughly 38%. Analyst split: Wedbush's Dan Ives holds a Street-high $600 Buy target; JPMorgan ended 8 years of bearish coverage in June 2026 with a $475 Neutral call; the low end sits near $25. The bull case now rests on: Robotaxi (Cybercab began commercial rides in Austin on September 3, 2026) and Optimus (Gen 3 mass production started in January 2026) — not on vehicle sales growth. Biggest near-term risk: NHTSA opened a federal audit into how Cybercab was certified without a steering wheel, the same week paid rides began. |
|---|
⚠ Disclaimer: This article is informational and is not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Prices and figures are as of September 10–11, 2026, and change constantly — verify current numbers with your broker before acting.
Contents
- Tesla Stock at a Glance (September 2026)
- Tesla Stock Price History in 2026
- Tesla Q2 2026 Earnings: The Numbers Behind the Swings
- Tesla Stock Forecast 2026: What Wall Street Analysts Say
- The 3 Growth Bets Behind the Tesla Stock Thesis
- 5 Risks That Could Sink Tesla Stock From Here
- Quick Comparison: Bull Case vs. Bear Case
- Is Tesla Stock a Buy in September 2026? Checklist
- Tesla Stock FAQ
- Summary
Tesla Stock at a Glance (September 2026)
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker / Exchange | NASDAQ: TSLA |
| Price (close, Sept 10, 2026) | $367.22 |
| Day's range | $363.80 – $375.44 |
| Market cap | ≈ $1.45 trillion |
| P/E ratio (trailing) | ≈ 342 |
| 52-week range | $297.38 – $498.83 |
| Avg. daily volume | ≈ 28.5M – 43.6M shares |
| Next earnings date | Late October 2026 (Q3 2026, estimated) |
| Consensus analyst rating | Hold, leaning toward Buy (split across data providers) |
Quote and range data above are pulled from Robinhood's TSLA page as of the September 10, 2026 close; volume and historical range figures also draw on Investing.com's TSLA price history. Quotes vary slightly by provider and by the minute — treat the numbers here as close-of-day approximations, not a live feed.
👉 A 342x trailing P/E means the market is pricing in years of future robotaxi and robotics profit that doesn't exist on the income statement yet. That's the single most important thing to understand before anything else in this article.
Tesla Stock Price History in 2026: From an All-Time High to a 52-Week Low and Back
TSLA closed at an all-time high of $489.88 on December 16, 2025. The slide began in early 2026, when Q1 deliveries of 358,023 vehicles missed Wall Street's roughly 372,000-unit consensus, and Tesla's own inventory of unsold cars climbed to a record level. JPMorgan's Ryan Brinkman, then the loudest bear on the stock, reiterated an Underweight rating with a $145 target — implying roughly 60% downside at the time. Shares fell to a 26-week low of $381.31 in March 2026 and kept drifting lower through the spring.
The real low came after the Q2 2026 earnings report on July 22. Despite record deliveries, the EPS miss sent shares tumbling, and TSLA touched a 52-week low of $297.38 in early August 2026 before stabilizing. The turnaround came from an unexpected place: on June 5, 2026, JPMorgan upgraded Tesla to Neutral and lifted its target to $475 from $145 — ending eight straight years of bearish coverage — after re-modeling Tesla as a vertically integrated AI and robotics platform rather than primarily a car company.
From there, the stock rallied hard into late summer. Over the one-month window ending September 11, 2026, TSLA ranged from $323.64 to $384.04, before the September 3 Cybercab launch in Austin triggered both a same-day federal audit query from NHTSA and headlines calling the rollout an "underwhelming" event that sent shares down about 6%. As of the September 10 close, TSLA sits at $367.22 — roughly flat to slightly positive over the trailing twelve months, according to TradingEconomics, and still about 26% below its December 2025 peak.
💡 The pattern all year has been consistent: delivery and earnings misses hit the stock hard, but autonomy and robotics headlines — not car sales — have driven every major rally, including the one that pulled TSLA back from $297 to the high $300s.
Tesla Q2 2026 Earnings: The Numbers Behind the Swings
Tesla's second-quarter 2026 report, released after market close on July 22, 2026, is the single most important data point behind this year's price action. Here is the breakdown:
| Metric | Q2 2026 Result | vs. Estimate / YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $28.24B | Beat $26.4B estimate (+26% YoY) |
| Adjusted (non-GAAP) EPS | $0.33 | Missed ~$0.53 estimate (about −38%) |
| GAAP operating margin | 1.4% | Operating income fell 57% YoY to $398M |
| Vehicle deliveries | 480,126 | Q2 record, +25% YoY |
| Capital expenditure | $5.79B | +142% YoY |
| Free cash flow | −$1.09B deficit | vs. +$1.44B surplus in Q1 2026 |
| FY2026 capex guidance | Above $25B | Raised; expected to keep rising for 2–3 years |
The split is unusual: automotive revenue grew 23% to $20.52B and services revenue jumped 50% to a record, yet auto gross margin excluding regulatory credits fell from 19.2% in Q1 to 16.3% in Q2, partly because regulatory credit revenue itself collapsed 67% year over year to just $146M as federal EV incentives wound down. On the software side, active Full Self-Driving subscriptions reached 1.48 million, up 56% year over year, with more than 55% of North American deliveries shipping with FSD attached.
✔ Revenue growth is real and accelerating. Profitability is being sacrificed on purpose — capex more than doubled to fund Robotaxi, Optimus and AI compute buildout. That trade-off is the entire investment debate around this stock right now.
Tesla Stock Forecast 2026: What Wall Street Analysts Say Right Now
Few large-cap stocks show as wide an analyst spread as Tesla. Here's where the major price targets stand heading into Q3 2026 earnings:
| Analyst / Firm | Rating | Price Target | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wedbush (Dan Ives) | Buy / Outperform | $600 (Street high) | Reiterated through 2026 misses, citing AI and robotaxi upside |
| JPMorgan (Rajat Gupta) | Neutral | $475 | Upgraded from Underweight/$145 in June 2026, ending 8 years of bearish calls |
| Morgan Stanley | Equal-weight | $415 | Per FXOpen analyst roundup |
| Jefferies (Philippe Houchois) | Hold | $400 | Raised from $375 on July 13, 2026 |
| Barclays (Dan Levy) | Equal-weight | $360 | As Tesla wound down Model S/X production |
| GLJ Research (Gordon Johnson) | Sell | ≈ $25 (Street low) | Longstanding bear on demand and margins |
| Consensus (MarketBeat) | Hold-leaning | $401.74 | Snapshot ~1 week before Sept 11, 2026 |
| Consensus (Public.com, 26 analysts) | Buy | $424.80 | Snapshot dated Sept 9, 2026 |
The roughly $25-to-$600 range — a 24x spread — exists because analysts fundamentally disagree on what Tesla is. Value it as an automaker with compressing margins and it looks expensive at 340x earnings. Value it as the vertically integrated AI and robotics platform JPMorgan now models, with EPS potentially reaching $7.50 by 2030, and the current price can look reasonable or even cheap.
👉 Notice the story behind each number, not just the number. The bulls (Ives, JPMorgan's new stance) are pricing in robotaxi and Optimus revenue that doesn't exist yet. The bears (GLJ Research, JPMorgan's old stance) are pricing Tesla purely as a car company with shrinking margins.
The 3 Growth Bets Behind the Tesla Stock Thesis
Every bull argument on Tesla stock in 2026 comes back to three programs. None of them show up meaningfully in revenue yet.
1. Robotaxi and Cybercab: Commercial Revenue, Finally — Under a Federal Microscope
Tesla began charging fares for Cybercab rides in Austin on September 3, 2026 — the first real commercial revenue from the no-steering-wheel, no-pedal robotaxi. Regulators responded the same day: NHTSA opened Audit Query AQ26002 to review how Tesla self-certified the vehicle under federal safety standards that assume a human driver. That's separate from an existing NHTSA probe into Full Self-Driving software covering roughly 3.2 million Tesla vehicles.
Tesla is also planning a roughly 10x expansion of its geofenced service area, with California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada named as near-term targets. The structural bottleneck: NHTSA currently caps annual sales of vehicles that don't meet standard safety equipment rules — like Cybercab — at 2,500 units, a limit that would need to be lifted before Cybercab can scale nationally.
💡 Robotaxi revenue is real for the first time, but it is currently capped by regulation, not demand. The September NHTSA audit is worth tracking closely — a negative finding could delay the whole expansion timeline.
2. Optimus: A Second Product Line Hiding Inside a Car Company
Tesla started mass production of Optimus Gen 3 at its Fremont, California factory on January 21, 2026. The 2026 target is 50,000 to 100,000 units, with a run-rate of up to 1 million units a year targeted at Fremont by year-end and a dedicated Giga Texas Optimus factory under construction for eventual 10-million-unit annual capacity.
Optimus isn't just a product line — it's written into Elon Musk's compensation. Tesla shareholders approved a pay package worth up to $1 trillion over 10 years with over 75% support in November 2025, and one of the milestones Musk must hit for the full award is delivering 1 million humanoid robots, alongside market-cap targets running as high as $8.5 trillion — more than five times today's market cap.
✔ Optimus production has actually started, which is further than the program has ever gotten before. But Tesla's own robotics timelines have slipped repeatedly, and the 50,000–100,000-unit 2026 target is a small fraction of the eventual multi-million-unit ambition.
3. Energy Storage: The Quiet Profit Engine
Tesla's energy segment is smaller than autos but growing fast: $3.14B in Q2 2026 revenue (+13% YoY) on 13.5 GWh of storage deployments (+41% YoY), the second-best quarter on record. The catch: energy gross margin fell from 39.5% to 20.4% quarter over quarter, due to a roughly $240M warranty true-up and the absence of a one-time tariff benefit that boosted Q1 margins.
👉 Energy is the one Tesla segment already generating real, growing profit at scale — but Q2's margin drop is a reminder that even the "boring" part of the business isn't immune to one-off charges.
5 Risks That Could Sink Tesla Stock From Here
- Regulatory credit collapse. Revenue from selling regulatory credits fell 67% year over year to $146M as federal EV incentives expired, removing a cushion that historically padded Tesla's bottom line.
- Margin compression. Auto gross margin excluding credits fell to 16.3% from 19.2% quarter over quarter, even with record deliveries — the price-cut strategy that drives volume is expensive.
- Regulatory scrutiny of Robotaxi. The new NHTSA audit into Cybercab's certification, layered on top of an existing FSD safety probe covering 3.2 million vehicles, could delay the expansion the bull case depends on.
- The 2,500-unit federal cap. Cybercab can't legally scale nationally until NHTSA either grants an exemption or updates rules written for vehicles with steering wheels.
- Valuation with no room for error. A trailing P/E above 340 and a GF Value assessment citing TSLA as roughly 35% overvalued leave little cushion if autonomy or robotics timelines slip again, as they have multiple times before.
💡 None of these risks are new to Tesla — but 2026 is the first year several of them (regulatory credits, the NHTSA Cybercab audit) are hitting the income statement and the news cycle at the same time.
Quick Comparison: Tesla Stock Bull Case vs. Bear Case
| Factor | Bull Case | Bear Case |
|---|---|---|
| Valuation | Priced as an AI/robotics platform, not just an automaker | P/E above 340 leaves no margin for execution missteps |
| Robotaxi | Commercial revenue started Sept 2026; 10x geofence expansion planned | NHTSA audit AQ26002 plus a 2,500-unit federal sales cap |
| Optimus | Gen 3 mass production live since Jan 2026; tied to the $1T pay package | Prior Optimus timelines have slipped repeatedly before |
| Margins | FSD attach rate and subscriber base growing fast (1.48M active users) | Auto margin ex-credits fell to 16.3% in Q2 2026 |
| Analyst view | Wedbush $600 Buy; JPMorgan reversed an 8-year bear call to $475 | GLJ Research holds a Street-low ≈$25 Sell target |
Is Tesla Stock a Buy in September 2026? A 5-Step Checklist
- Decide which company you're actually buying — the automaker or the AI/robotics platform — because the current valuation only really makes sense under the second story.
- Mark the next earnings date. Tesla's Q3 2026 report is expected in late October 2026; delivery numbers and any Robotaxi or Optimus updates are likely to move the stock more than the topline revenue figure.
- Track the NHTSA Cybercab audit. A negative finding could stall the geographic expansion much of the current bull case leans on.
- Compare your own view to the $25–$600 analyst range and identify which specific assumption — robotaxi scale, Optimus volume, or margin recovery — you personally believe is realistic.
- Size the position for volatility. TSLA moved from a 52-week low of $297.38 to an intraday high near $384 and back within a matter of weeks in August–September 2026 alone.
✔ There's no universal answer here — the split among professional analysts is itself the honest picture of how uncertain this bet is. This checklist is a framework for your own research, not a recommendation.
Tesla Stock FAQ
What is Tesla's stock price today?
TSLA closed at $367.22 on September 10, 2026, within a 52-week range of $297.38 to $498.83. The price moves throughout the trading day, so check a live quote before acting.
Is Tesla stock a good buy in 2026?
Opinions are unusually split: Wedbush holds a Street-high $600 Buy target citing robotaxi and AI upside, while GLJ Research holds a Street-low ≈$25 Sell target. Consensus estimates from different providers range from about $402 to $425 with a Hold-to-Buy lean. Whether it fits your portfolio depends on your own view of Tesla's autonomy and robotics timeline — that's a call for you and, ideally, a licensed financial advisor, not an article.
Why did Tesla stock drop after Q2 2026 earnings?
Revenue ($28.24B) and deliveries (480,126) both hit records, but adjusted EPS of $0.33 missed the roughly $0.53 consensus by about 38% as capital expenditure more than doubled and operating margin fell to 1.4%.
What is Tesla's market cap?
Roughly $1.45 trillion as of the September 10, 2026 close, making Tesla one of the most valuable companies in the world despite a trailing P/E ratio above 300.
When does Tesla report Q3 2026 earnings?
Tesla's Q3 2026 report is expected in late October 2026, with estimates clustering between October 20 and October 28. Tesla had not confirmed an exact date as of this writing — check Tesla's investor relations page closer to the date.
Summary
Tesla stock in 2026 is no longer really a bet on car sales. Deliveries hit a record in Q2, and the stock fell anyway. What moves TSLA now is whether Robotaxi and Optimus can convert years of rising capex into the kind of margins that justify a $1.45 trillion valuation and a 340x P/E — while a federal audit decides how fast the robotaxi rollout is even allowed to scale.
The honest summary is the analyst spread itself: a $25-to-$600 range isn't noise, it's a direct measure of how unresolved this question still is. Whichever side of that range you land on, price in the volatility — this stock moved nearly 30% in a single month twice in 2026 already.
⚠ Reminder: this is general information, not financial advice. Figures cited are as of September 10–11, 2026, and will change. Do your own research and consider consulting a licensed professional before investing.
Tracking the Optimus production ramp and Robotaxi expansion as the milestones behind Tesla's $1 trillion pay package land? Browse our full archive for ongoing coverage, or run your own numbers with the Tesla Stock Calculator.
NEVER MISS AN OPTIMUS UPDATE
We track every Tesla Optimus development — specs, deployment milestones, pricing and competitive moves — updated as news breaks.