Top tech investor Paul Meeks doesn’t buy into the Tesla hype, saying the stock could be a buy — but only at the right price. “You almost have to believe in the cult, and it is a cult, just a little bit to buy that stock, because you are never going to be a hardcore analyst like me and put pen on paper and come up with math that tells you that the stock is cheap,” Meeks, portfolio manager at Independent Solutions Wealth Management, told CNBC Pro Talks last week. “You can never, as a fundamental analyst, come up with a valuation that makes sense,” for Tesla, he added. Meeks did not advise avoiding the stock altogether, however — he’s just not buying it at its current valuation. “I think Tesla could be bought. It had a bit of a bounce recently off the whole fiasco with [CEO] Elon Musk and the Twitter acquisition,” he said. Musk, who is Tesla’s co-founder and CEO, sold 7.92 million shares of the company worth around $6.88 billion between Aug. 5 and 9 as he prepared to stockpile cash amid a contentious legal battle over the acquisition of social networking giant Twitter. In July, Musk said he was terminating the deal . The equity sale came as Musk sought to “to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock” in the “(hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close and some equity partners don’t come through,” the maverick CEO wrote in a social media post. A price that makes ‘more sense’ Tesla’s shares plunged in the first half of the year amid the broad market sell-off, but have since pared some losses. The stock closed at around $900 on Friday, giving the company a market capitalization of around $940 billion, but down 14% since the start of the year. Its valuation is still some way off the exclusive $1 trillion market cap that the EV behemoth achieved prior to this year’s market rout, but Meeks still thinks the stock is too expensive. Read more Time to go all-in on tech? Top investor Paul Meeks shares his take — and reveals what he’s buying Asset manager likes this chip stock so much, he’s putting his own money into it Fund manager says the bear market rally won’t last and reveals how to position for it “I think Tesla becomes more interesting to me at about $600 or $700 … [it] seems to make a little bit more sense [fundamentally],” he said. Meeks added that from a technical analysis perspective, the charts also indicate that a breakout — when a stock moves above a certain point in a sustained fashion — could be on the cards. Despite this, Meek said he would “watch like a hawk” what Tesla’s competitors are doing in the EV space. He acknowledged that Elon Musk had led the creation of the EV industry, but said competition was now heating up as new tech auto companies, as well as traditional automakers such as the likes of Ford and General Motors , pour “billions and billion and billions” of dollars into research. “They will get there,” he warned.
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