ARK’s New Tesla Model Puts the Stock at $4,400 by 2031, With Robotaxi Doing Most of the Work

Image: Tesla Robotaxi/X

ARK Invest has updated its open-source Tesla valuation model, and it now puts the stock at an expected value of about $4,400 a share in 2031, with robotaxis making up roughly 80% of what ARK thinks the company will be worth.

That’s according to ARK’s new research article, which the firm shared from its X account on Monday afternoon. ARK’s bull and bear cases, which it defines as the 75th and 25th percentile outcomes of a Monte Carlo simulation built on 32 inputs, come in at about $5,000 and $3,300 a share. In the base case, ARK has Tesla selling 10.2 million cars in 2031, running about 8.1 million robotaxis and earning $753 billion in ride-hail revenue, out of total revenue of about $1.45 trillion.

Robotaxi’s share of the value is down from about 90% in ARK’s 2024 model, which put Tesla at $2,600 a share in 2029, mostly because ARK now gives Optimus real weight. Daniel Maguire, one of the article’s two authors, wrote on X that Optimus contributes “~15%” of Tesla’s 2031 enterprise value “as it reaches human-level proficiency and ~1 million Optimi generate Robot-as-a-Service revenue for Tesla.” The article puts that at about $200 billion in robot revenue in 2031 and calls ARK’s forecast “much more conservative than Elon’s guidance of 100 million to one billion Optimus units in 2031.”

ARK also added a line for AI infrastructure this time, assuming Tesla’s spending grows from about $7 billion cumulatively at the end of 2025 to about $225 billion by the end of 2031, partly through the Terafab chip project with SpaceX. The model treats Tesla as a standalone company, drops robotaxi operations in China and assumes Musk’s stock-based compensation vests within the period. ARK names “a slower-than-expected ramp in robotaxi operations” as the main risk, and its disclaimers say the forecasts reflect its “biases and long-term positive view of the company.” The full model is posted on GitHub for anyone who wants to test the assumptions.

ARK’s update comes just ahead of Tesla’s third-quarter results, with the earnings call set for Wednesday, October 21 at 2:30 PM PT. Robotaxi is near the top of shareholders’ list as well, since the leading question on Tesla’s Say page asks how the Cybercab fleet scales past Austin, as we covered in our look at the top investor questions.

ARK’s robotaxi math starts from a much smaller real-world fleet, since Tesla’s Robotaxi account said on October 10 that more than 300 Cybercabs are serving Austin, an eightfold increase in the month after paid rides began, and Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy followed up with “Dallas soon.” ARK’s article notes that Tesla has framed FSD V15, expected late this year, as the gating factor for scaling the service.

ARK’s split also lines up fairly closely with how Elon Musk describes the company. Musk wrote on X on October 17 that “Optimus and Cybercab will be the vast majority of Tesla’s value,” as we reported over the weekend. On the July earnings call, he also warned that Optimus is “going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla,” and Tesla still hasn’t shared a price per robot or named an outside customer.

Do you think robotaxis can really make up 80% of Tesla’s value by 2031, or is ARK leaning too hard on one bet?