Elon Musk just made bold new bet that could lift TSLA stock

Most of what a chief executive says on a stage is forgotten by the next earnings call. The exceptions are the moments when a CEO stakes the company’s entire story on a single date. Those moments stick, because shareholders bank on them, employees plan around them, and short sellers either get rich or get burned.

For Tesla (TSLA), the calendar has been the harshest storyteller. Vehicle sales slowed across 2025, operating margins compressed, and China lapped the company on volume. The stock spent most of 2026 clawing back ground it lost in the first quarter, and the story still capable of justifying its valuation had very little to do with the cars currently rolling off the line.

Then on May 18, the man at the center of it all stepped to a virtual podium in Tel Aviv. Speaking by video link to the Smart Mobility Summit, Elon Musk pushed his most aggressive driverless timeline yet, telling a global audience that fully self-driving Teslas with no humans inside would be “probably widespread” across the United States by year-end, according to Reuters.

Elon Musk speaks at Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv

Photo by ILIA YEFIMOVICH on Getty Images

Inside Musk’s Tel Aviv promise for Tesla robotaxis

Musk’s appearance was virtual but the headline was loud. He told the conference that self-driving Teslas were already operating in Texas without safety monitors and that the service would expand nationwide before the calendar turned, Reuters reported.

What I keep coming back to is the number behind the claim. Tesla’s unsupervised robotaxi fleet “consists of ~30 vehicles across Austin, Dallas, and Houston,” according to Electrek. Waymo, by contrast, runs more than 250 vehicles in Austin alone, Stocktwits highlighted. 

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Scaling from fewer than 40 cars in three cities to widespread in roughly seven months is the kind of leap Musk’s investors have heard before. It is also the kind that has historically slipped quarters at a time.

On the Q1 2026 earnings call last month, Musk himself pushed unsupervised FSD for consumer vehicles to no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2026, citing complex intersections, bad road markings, and weather challenges, according to Electrek. The Tel Aviv version of the story is harder to square with the version he delivered three weeks ago to his own analysts.

The reason the timeline matters is that the stock no longer trades like a car company. It trades like a long-dated call option on autonomy, and the option premium has been climbing.

Tesla shares climbed roughly 26% in the month into mid-May before May 18’s Tel Aviv appearance and were trading near $445, according to The Motley Fool. The rally has been built almost entirely on robotaxi sentiment, while the underlying delivery numbers stayed flat.

Why Tesla stock rebuilt around the autonomy bet

Related: Elon Musk has a stark message on Americans and the economy

Yet the market’s response on May 18 was a tell. TSLA closed at $409.99, down 2.9% on the session and extending a three-day losing streak, even as Musk was making one of his most bullish forecasts of the year. The same crowd that bid the stock up off the April low was unwilling to buy the same robotaxi promise twice in three weeks.

Here is what the gap between promise and reality actually looks like right now:

Tesla unsupervised robotaxi fleet, fewer than 40 vehicles across three Texas cities, per The Motley Fool.Waymo’s Austin fleet alone, more than 250 vehicles, per Stocktwits.Tesla FSD active subscriptions in Q1, 1.28 million, up 51% year over year, per 24/7 Wall St.Tesla trailing price-to-earnings ratio, 416x as of mid-May, per 24/7 Wall St.Wedbush bull-case Tesla market cap, $3 trillion by year-end 2026, per a Wedbush research note via Teslarati.

When I ran those numbers against Tesla’s stated rollout pace, the “widespread” promise lands in a place where the math has to start cooperating very quickly.

Why analysts can’t agree on Tesla’s robotaxi bet

The bullish read on this comes loudest from Wedbush. Tesla’s autonomy story is approaching “a defining moment, where its long-running Robotaxi narrative evolves from vision to execution,” veteran analyst Dan Ives said, according to TheStreet. His base case puts Tesla at a $2 trillion market cap in 2026, with a bull case at $3 trillion and a price target of $600.

The bear case is not that the autonomy story is fake. It is that the price already assumes it works. Tesla “trades at a trailing P/E ratio of 416x and a forward P/E ratio of 208x, against an average analyst target of $412.25,” according to 24/7 Wall St. That is a valuation that requires Musk’s timelines to hold, not just trend in the right direction.

Morgan Stanley sits closer to that camp. The firm cut TSLA to equal weight while keeping a $425 price target, citing stretched valuation and choppy 2026 volume estimates, according to TheStreet. Even Musk’s own $1 trillion pay package depends on market-cap milestones that are essentially unreachable without a working autonomy business.

In my analysis, the split between $425 and $600 is not really about cars. It is about whether you trust the Musk who spoke in Tel Aviv on May 18 or the Musk who spoke on the Q1 call in April.

What to watch next on Tesla stock

The number that will decide this is not a Musk soundbite. It is the unsupervised fleet count in October. If Tesla goes from fewer than 40 robotaxis in three Texas cities to a national footprint by year-end, the “widespread” claim will look prescient and the $600 price targets will look conservative.

If it does not, this Tel Aviv promise joins a long list of others, and the stock has to defend a 416x trailing multiple without the catalyst the price already assumes. May 18’s 2.9% drop suggests the market is already starting to mark that risk to a different price.

The good news for shareholders is that FSD subscriptions are still growing on the only metric that actually pays the bills today. The harder news is that subscriptions are not the same thing as a driverless car operating commercially with no one in the seat. Until the gap between those two numbers closes, Musk’s Tel Aviv promise stays exactly that.

Related: Tesla gets a China win that comes with a warning

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