Tesla gains with South Korea, Cybertruck developments pushing aside Twitter distraction
Spencer Platt

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) moved higher in early trading on Wednesday after CEO Elon Musk stated that he considers South Korea a top candidate for a potential Gigafactory investment. The remarks were reported by President Yoon Suk Yeol after a virtual meeting Musk had with Yoon.
The recent talk reportedly included Musk saying Tesla (TSLA) would be willing to actively invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure in South Korea and expand supply chain cooperation with South Korean companies.
In other Tesla news, a crowdsourced spreadsheet that tracks Cybertruck orders show net reservations at over 1.6M to represent $123B in booked revenue. Electrek expects the price range of the Cybertruck to end up at $50,000 to $90,000 due to inflation.
Shares of Tesla (TSLA) are looking to break out of a rut that has seen them fall 57% in 2022. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas thinks the situation at Twitter is potentially exposing Tesla to some extra risk along a number of areas including consumer sentiment/demand, commercial partnerships, government relations/support and capital markets support. "While difficult to quantify, we believe there must be some form of sentiment âcircuit breakerâ around the Twitter situation to calm investor concerns around Tesla," he noted.
Looking ahead, Jonas and team still recommend Tesla, noting it is the only EV name it covers that generates a profit before incentives on the sale of EVs.
Tesla (TSLA) is called the only self-funding pure play EV name MS covers and is noted to have achieved a unique position to secure supply of the necessary battery metals and related up-stream supply necessary to produce EVs at multi-million-unit scale.
"In a slowing economic environment, we believe Teslaâs 'gap to competitionâ can potentially widen, particularly as EV prices pivot from inflationary to deflationary. With respect to the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) we believe Tesla is by far the best positioned OEM in terms of potential eligibility for consumer tax credits (up to $7,500/unit) and for Section 45x production credits (up to $45/KWh). The current price offers approximately 100% potential upside to our $330 price target which is the highest upside to target we have seen from Tesla in over 5 years."
See the valuation metrics on Tesla.