Shares of electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla (TSLA) slumped Thursday on reports the company is delaying the unveiling of its robotaxi vehicle.
The shares dropped 8.4% to $241.03 on a Bloomberg News report that the unveiling of the robotaxi will be moved from Aug. 8 until October.
The Bloomberg report did not give a specific date for the new unveiling.
The share-price loss was Tesla’s first after 11 straight gains. It was also the company’s biggest one-day decline since a 12.1% decline on Jan.25, after a disastrous analyst earnings call.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk was the biggest loser in Thursday’s decline. The value of his 20.5% stake in the company fell nearly $16 billion — from $188.24 billion to $172.34 billion.
The reason for the delay, Bloomberg said, was that teams working on the project “needed more time to build additional prototypes.”
The report suggested the team had been told to “rework certain elements of the car.”
Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, a long-time Tesla bull, conceded the news hit the stock hard.
But, he told clients in a note, “We believe the timing of robotaxis, partnerships, and the ultimate autonomous and AI driven technology does not change at all for our bullish Tesla thesis.”
Musk had trumpeted the original date to unveil the robotaxi in an April 8 tweet on X, formerly Twitter. The tweet offered no details.
Musk’s tweet generated lots of excitement and boosted the company’s stock price by 4.9% that day alone. It helped the shares rise nearly 60% from then through Wednesday.
With Thursday’s loss, however, the shares slipped from being up nearly 6% for the year to down 3%.
Source: https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/tesla-pushes-back-big-robotaxi-unveiling
