ARK Invest Ties 80% of Tesla (TSLA) 2031 Value to Robotaxis in Updated Model

ARK Invest's Updated 2031 Model

Tesla (TSLA) now leans its long-term valuation case on a single business outside car sales. In an updated model, the fund's first revision since 2024, ARK Invest puts the stock near $4,400 per share in 2031, almost 12 times the October 19 close of $368.06. The call lands with the shares already down 18.16% since January 1. The business doing the heavy lifting is robotaxis, Tesla's driverless ride-hailing service, which the fund ties to about 80% of the company's enterprise value in 2031. ARK first set out the robotaxi thesis years ago, and the new note quantifies it against the rollout record so far. Robotaxi here means a fleet of driverless vehicles dispatched to paying riders through Tesla's own network, a service the company launched in Austin, Texas, in June 2025. In the base case, Tesla sells 10.2 million vehicles in 2031, up from 1.6 million in 2025, and operates about 8.1 million robotaxis generating $753 billion in net ride-hail revenue. Optimus, the company's humanoid robot, adds $212 billion in the base case, drawn from about one million units sold to external buyers rather than internal factory use. A new line in the model covers the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure behind Optimus, with cumulative spending on that buildout reaching $225 billion by 2031, compared with roughly $7 billion spent by the close of 2025. Total base-case revenue reaches $1.45 trillion that year across vehicle sales, the ride-hail network and Optimus-related services. The robotaxi weighting itself came down from the previous edition: ARK analysts Tasha Keeney and Daniel Maguire wrote that robotaxis account for roughly 80% of enterprise value in 2031, versus about 90% in 2029 in the 2024 version, because the team expects the Optimus Robot-as-a-Service offering to reach an inflection point while robotaxis keep proliferating.

Slower Rollout and Wednesday's Earnings

ARK describes the robotaxi rollout as slower than it expected, and that gap shapes the rest of the note. The 2024 edition picked 2025 as the likely launch year and set a $2,600 per-share target for 2029. The service did go live in Austin in June 2025 and has since expanded to seven cities across three states, surpassing one million driverless miles without a human supervisor across roughly seven months. The fund partly used the slower pace to set about 2031 as the point when Optimus could reach human-level skill. A slower-than-expected robotaxi ramp is the main risk ARK names to its own numbers, with four possible causes: regulatory delays, which it sees diminishing as driverless vehicles post better safety results than human-driven cars; a sudden departure by Elon Musk; a natural disaster; and a pandemic. Its disclosure also states the forecasts carry a bias toward positive outcomes, and that some or all results could come in far below the base case. On timing, Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives & Co. sees the robotaxi footprint reaching additional cities in early to mid-2027, with Optimus following later that year. The expansion record matters for the earnings call, because city count is one of the inputs ARK's analysts flag directly. The next checkpoint comes fast: Tesla's third-quarter results filing is due October 21, and consensus calls for $0.21 in earnings per share, versus $0.37 twelve months earlier. The call is where ARK's inputs get their test, since robotaxi city expansion, Optimus timing and the pace of AI infrastructure spending are exactly what holders were told to watch. Wednesday's print also gives management a public stage to address the AI infrastructure budget the new model line assumes.

The tape into the print already leans constructive. COINOTAG data shows Tesla at $368.72, up 3.53% over the past 24 hours, after a session range of $352.91 to $370.64. COINOTAG's composite scoring rates the nearest support at $366.57 a perfect 100/100, built on a stack of moving-average levels, while the strongest resistance stands at $383.28, scored 92/100. Momentum readings are mixed: the daily RSI sits at 51.2, deep in neutral, inside a sideways trend on the daily timeframe, and the MACD signal points bearish. Traders taking equity exposure through a stock perpetual, a futures-style contract on the listed share, currently carry $68.77 million in open interest. Readers who want the mechanics of equity access through crypto venues can start with our guide to Bitget Stock Futures.