Fund Manager Recommends Elon Musk Buyback Tesla Shares To Spark Stock Turnaround

The Future Fund Managing Partner Gary Black said in a post on X on Thursday that nothing indicates more confidence in a company than its CEO buying shares.

• Tesla must also rely on other measures such as running a brand awareness campaign and launching a conventional pickup truck, Black said.  
• The fund manager noted that competitors to Tesla in the autonomous driving space are continuing to scale. 
• Black further noted that Nasdaq-100 has fallen a meagre single digit compared to Tesla’s double digit drop in 2026.

The Future Fund Managing Partner Gary Black on Thursday said that Tesla Inc.’s (TSLA) Elon Musk can buy back shares of the EV giant to reverse the underperformance in 2026.

“There is nothing that speaks confidence more than a CEO who buys his/her own stock,” Black said in a post on X while also noting that TSLA shares have underperformed this year despite its advancements in autonomous driving.

The fund manager further noted that Nasdaq-100 has fallen a meagre single digit compared to Tesla’s double digit drop.

Rising Competition

Tesla’s competitor in autonomous driving and Alphabet’s robotaxi unit Waymo continue to scale their robotaxi operations even as others such as WeRide and Baidu are already offering paid autonomous rides, Black noted. He added that chipmaker Nvidia has also announced AI chips and software stack that will be made available to carmakers to customize for their autonomous offering starting in 2026.

Given the rising competition, Tesla must rely on other measures to ensure a stock price turnaround such as running a brand awareness campaign which puts forth the abilities of its autonomous driving product, and launch a conventional pickup truck unlike the company’s current truck offered called the Cybertruck, Black said.  

“With an 8% global segment share, pickups remain the most unpenetrated of all TSLA TAMs.  Even a 10% share of the pickup segment would translate to $1.20/share of earnings before cannibalization of Model Y - a 40% increase in 2027 earnings,” Black wrote.

Robotaxi Safety Monitor

Black also said that Tesla must remove all safety monitors from their robotaxis. “If TSLA mgmt truly believe FSD would require just 1 critical disengagement per year (similar to Waymo), then remove monitors from the cars.  Prove the skeptics wrong,” he said.

Tesla launched robotaxis without safety monitors in January in Austin, marking a key step towards Musk’s ambitions of deploying autonomous vehicles in as much as half of the U.S. by the end of the year.

However, Tesla executive Ashok Elluswamy then clarified in a post on X that some vehicles in the company’s fleet will continue to have a safety monitor for the time being, although they will be reduced in time.

Currently, the company has about 500 Model Y vehicles operating as robotaxis across the Bay Area and Austin, Musk said during Tesla’s earnings call late last month. However, the company is being cautious while scaling the service, he added.

How Did Stocktwits Users React?

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around TSLA stock remained within the ‘extremely bearish’ territory over the past 24 hours, while message volume remained at ‘high’ labels.

TSLA stock has gained over 4% over the past 12 months

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