Time to Revoke Tesla’s Magnificent Seven Card?

For Tesla, the future can’t come soon enough. Though the company can’t flip on autonomous driving cruise control in the meantime, either.

An all-time share price peak reached in December signaled that investors now view Tesla as a future-forward robotics and robotaxi business rather than a pure EV play. But Tesla’s share price has plummeted more than 20% since, even as the S&P 500 climbed to its own record high. And as the world awaits its robo-future, Tesla’s first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday showed its present-day core businesses are continuing to sputter.

So what does that make Tesla in 2026? A Magnificent Seven outlier, for one thing.

Riding Solo, So Low

Tesla did report a revenue beat on Wednesday, notching nearly $22.4 billion in total sales in Q1, a touch ahead of FactSet’s calculated consensus expectations of just under $22.3 billion. That would be nice if Wall Street hadn’t already dramatically lowered its expectations. According to a Bloomberg analysis, analysts had slashed their Q1 expectations by 30% in the past six months. 

Still, Tesla has been trading as an aggressively future-focused play, a stark contrast to its Mag 7 peers. Shares of Tesla trade at around 183 times forward earnings, making them the third-most-expensive S&P 500 member (behind only Boeing and the Ellison-inflated Warner Bros. Discovery). 

Tesla has been the worst performer among the Mag 7 since its December 16 peak, and its first-quarter results reinforce the reasons many have subbed the company out of the Mag 7 for chipmaker Broadcom:

• Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in Q1, down 14% quarter-over-quarter and missing expectations. While it did amount to a modest 6% rise year-over-year, 2025’s Q1 had artificially deflated sales figures due to a Model Y production shutdown amid factory firmware updates; distressingly, Tesla built around 50,000 more cars than it sold in Q1.
• Worse, Tesla’s battery unit, long the quiet backbone of the entire business, is also running out of juice. Total storage deployment plummeted 15% in the quarter, defying expectations of an increase by most analysts. Battery and solar revenue had increased more than 350% from 2021 through 2025.

Blessing and a Cursor: Tesla has delivered a few caveats of upside. Its robotaxi service expanded over the weekend to Houston and Dallas, after previously operating exclusively in Austin. Meanwhile, the firm is working hard to swipe public contracts from traditional Detroit players. Elsewhere in Muskworld, the soon-to-IPO SpaceX on Wednesday said it struck a deal with the option to acquire AI-coding startup Cursor “later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.” If investors see Tesla as a singular bet on Musk’s singular ambition and vision, a SpaceX launch into public orbit renders the EV-player no longer all that singular.