Gene Munster, co-founder and managing partner of Loup Ventures, believes that Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is a better stock than Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). According to tech analyst turned venture capitalist, Tesla could be the next Amazon, shares of which are trading near the $1,000 milestone. He expressed his opinion in CNBC’s Squawk on the Street on Friday.
Munster is bullish on Tesla because the automaker is “a controversial story.”
“People don’t understand what this company’s mission statement is,” the investor said, adding that Tesla’s situation is muck like Amazon in its early days when the e-commerce giant was ‘just’ selling books.
Munster believes that Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s main focus is to play a major role in the acceleration of the global transformation to renewable energy.
“Most people think of [Tesla] as an electric car company, but their mission statement is to accelerate the globe’s transformation to renewable energy,” he said. “When you start thinking about that you can see them grabbing market cap from energy companies which are some of the largest market-cap companies,” Munster said on CNBC.
On Wednesday morning, Tesla’s market capitalization around $56 billion while Amazon’s was around $474 billion.
So far this, Tesla’s stock is up over 57% while Amazon’s share price has surged over 32% since the start of the year.
Munster Sees More Growth Potential in Tesla
Though Amazon is the technology stock of the moment, there are limitations to the company’s growth, according to Munster. He said that one of “those limitations is maintaining market share.”
“I think obviously somebody buying the stock at $1,000, they’re hoping it goes to $2,000 so I think the opportunity again is the market share in online, that’s an increase and it would put Amazon at $1 trillion in revenue if they get to that,” Munster said.
According to the investor, Amazon Web Services – the cloud computing business of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), has been facing stiff competition from the likes of Microsoft and Google.
“The specific reason is Azure from Microsoft is gaining share, and Google is making a big push within that … so that’s an area that Amazon had an early lead on but is not maintaining the same market share they had in retail,” Munster said.
Meanwhile, Steve Wozniak – who co-founded Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) – said in an interview with Bloomberg that Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) could come up with the next big thing in tech and he’s going to bet on the company.
Wozniak said that Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is moving in the “best direction” and the automaker “put an awful lot of effort into very risky things” to create innovation products. He believes that self-driving technology is “the biggest, most obvious moonshot” at present.