Tesla: Buying at these levels means you get Optimus for 'free', Piper Sandler says

Tesla (TSLA) investors buying adjacent today's $420 stock terms are getting a large bonus — the Optimus robot concern for free.

At slightest that’s what Piper Sandler expert Alexander Potter wrote successful the concern bank’s 2nd variation of his "Definitive Guide to Investing successful Tesla.” Per Piper’s discounted currency travel (DCF) analysis, Tesla is worthy astir $400 per share, but Optimus is not portion of that analysis.

The updated exemplary breaks Tesla into 17 merchandise lines, ranging from vehicles and vigor retention to supercharging, in-house insurance, FSD subscriptions, and the robotaxi business. The sum of those lines utilizing a 20-year DCF investigation suggests Tesla is worthy $400 per stock — "just shy of TSLA's existent stock price."

"Critically, this investigation excludes Optimus, Tesla's forthcoming humanoid robot," Potter wrote. "In different words, astatine $400/share, we deliberation investors tin bargain Optimus for 'free'."

Potter is not claiming the robot is worthless. Optimus and a abstracted "inference-as-a-service" concern are "thesis-defining products that, arguably, volition beryllium worthy much than Tesla's different businesses combined," helium said.

But valuing specified a transformational concern is difficult, if not impossible. "Where to statesman forecasting products with the imaginable to fundamentally reshape labour markets and change planetary GDP? One day, we volition try... but for now, the investigation successful this study illustrates that there's nary rush."

Potter reiterated a $500 terms people connected the stock, unchanged from his erstwhile note. The mathematics is straightforward: $500 PT minus $400 successful modeled product-line worth leaves $100 per stock for Optimus, inference-as-a-service, and thing other not successful the 17-line build.

Potter believes that allocation is conservative. "Some would reason that's acold excessively debased (we're inclined to agree)."

A tricky valuation

If Potter's $400 basal lawsuit holds, today's terms is astir just worth for the parts of Tesla that tin beryllium modeled with accepted investigation — and the optionality connected humanoid robotics and AI inference is fundamentally thrown successful astatine nary charge.

But there’s a catch. The full "free Optimus" framing is based connected Piper Sandler’s caller valuation based connected a 233x FY27 net multiple, up from 180x, meaning it’s overmuch richer.

Potter argues that astir sell-side models springiness abbreviated shrift to Tesla's little disposable gross streams.

"We deliberation astir sell-side modeling efforts disregard the fiscal interaction of in-house insurance, Supercharging, and different outside-the-box gross streams," helium wrote. He besides notes that Piper’s anterior exemplary "lacked a superior effort to bespeak the 2025 CEO compensation plan, and it didn't delegate a circumstantial worth to the robo-taxi business."