Tesla could be a $10,000 stock in a decade, says longtime bull Ron Baron

Investing.com -- Ron Baron, the billionaire investor who has been one of Tesla’s most vocal long-term backers, laid out an ultra-bullish trajectory for the company’s stock in a new interview to CNBC, arguing that the market still underestimates the scale of what Elon Musk is building.

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Baron, founder of Baron Capital, has held Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock for more than a decade and is known for forecasting multiyear compounding returns from the electric-vehicle maker.

He said Tesla employees “don’t think” Musk will deliver anything less than five- to seven-fold gains over the next 10 years, followed by another multibagger run beyond that.

“I’m thinking about $2,500 of where his stock’s gonna be in 10 years. And I think it’s going to be four times that,” Baron said.

When asked whether such an outcome would be driven by cars, robots or something else, Baron pointed straight to Musk’s latest presentation.

“Have you watched his annual meeting?” he asked the interviewer, who said he hadn’t. Baron then urged him to look at Musk’s discussion of Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot that the CEO has said could ultimately become the company’s most valuable product line.

“Optimus is, I think, for him the next sort of leg of this whole biggest thing ever,” Baron said. He claimed Tesla is building production capacity for one million units next year and 10 million the year after, with Musk envisioning a future in which the company produces one billion units annually.

At roughly $20,000 per robot, Baron argued, the scale would be transformative. He framed it as a shift toward “sustainable abundancy,” where low-cost robotic labor reshapes living standards.

“They are gonna be light labor-saving. Make everyone’s life… much better,” he said, adding that Musk still sees a long-run path toward a human presence on Mars. “Maybe there will be a beach in Mars somewhere.”

Baron’s comments follow a fresh surge of investor focus on Tesla’s AI and robotics ambitions, after shareholders approved Musk’s new compensation plan and the CEO sharpened his pitch around Optimus and full autonomy.

Bank of America analyst Federico Merendi recently called Tesla a "leader in physical AI," bumping the stock target to $471.

"We continue to see TSLA as the company with the largest advantage in terms of autonomous driving initiatives and physical AI applications currently in the marketplace," he wrote in a note.

For Baron, the next decade of Tesla’s value creation rests on those ambitions, not on the car business alone.