# Brad Gerstner Sold Uber for Tesla and the Index Lapped Him - Track Record - November 2024 to September 2026 > A historical scorecard of Brad Gerstner's November 21, 2024 call to sell Uber and rotate into Tesla, measured through September 22, 2026. The pairs trade squeaked out a win, but both stocks lagged a plain S&P 500 index fund by wide margins. Verdict: Mixed. ## Track Record ### Brad Gerstner, November 2024 to September 2026 *This is a historical review of a call made on November 21, 2024, with performance measured from that date through September 22, 2026, about 22 months. It was published on September 23, 2026; the prices and grades below are as of the September 22, 2026 cutoff.* --- Welcome back to Track Record, where we take one famous investor, dig up a specific stock call they made out loud on a podcast, the exact words, the date, the ticker, and then check the scoreboard with no mercy and no cherry-picking. Wins and losses both. This issue: *Brad Gerstner*, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, one of the most-followed growth investors alive, co-host of the BG2 Pod with Bill Gurley and a recurring "fifth bestie" on the All-In podcast. Gerstner is a genuinely great investor with a long list of home runs. This particular call is not one of them. It's the kind of call that looks brilliant, then looks broken, then limps across the finish line just barely ahead, and gets lapped by a simple index fund the whole way. That's exactly why it's worth grading. --- ## The Call The setting: CNBC's Halftime Report, taped live in San Francisco on *November 21, 2024*, two weeks after the Trump election win, with Tesla ripping higher on Elon Musk's sudden proximity to the incoming administration. Host Scott Wapner is visibly surprised, because Gerstner had been one of Uber's loudest champions for years. And Gerstner tells him he just sold the whole position. Here's what he actually said, word for word: > "Leading up to the election… we have been taking down our position size and we've been rotating into Tesla. Why? Because I said before, we had a ChatGPT moment around full self-driving in 2024. I think the year of 2025 is going to be about robo taxi… After the election, we bought more Tesla and we rotated out of our remaining Uber because we think the optics are going to be really tough for Uber over the course of the next few months. And they're going to be really good for Tesla as we get closer and closer to the launch of robo taxi, which we think will be Q2 of next year." So there are actually four distinct, checkable predictions packed into that one answer: 1. *A pairs trade.* Long Tesla (TSLA), out of Uber (UBER) entirely. Tesla should beat Uber. 2. *A timing call on the stocks.* "The optics are going to be really tough for Uber over the course of the next few months. And they're going to be really good for Tesla." That's a near-term, next-few-months prediction. 3. *A product-launch call.* Tesla's robotaxi launches "Q2 of next year," i.e., by around June 2025. 4. *A winner-take-most thesis.* Self-driving is running away with it, and Tesla is the one running. "Tesla is running away with their full self-driving capabilities. The only other game in town really is Waymo." He was careful to leave himself an exit, and to be fair to him, we should quote it: "We were the biggest defenders of this stock [Uber] from $15 to $80. We sold the stock much higher than the stock is at today… I reserve the right. I may be buying this stock tomorrow or in a month or in two months." So this was a trade, not a forever-verdict on Uber. He said the same thing on his own show the very same day. On the BG2 Pod episode *"Ep20. AI Scaling Laws, DOGE, FSD 13, Trump Markets"* (Nov 21, 2024), Gerstner laid out the robotaxi timing bet in his own words: "If you said to me, over/under on middle of next year where we have evidence of a single market or two where RoboTaxi is working, I think we will. I'm going to take the over on that. And that is a huge difference from where the world was 18 or 24 months ago." One more thing that makes this call fun to grade: someone took the other side to his face. Josh Brown, sitting on the same Halftime desk and long Uber, said he was "shocked" and pushed back hard: > "I find it very hard to believe that you're going to have 10,000 Tesla full-self-driving cabs on the street, and that's going to upend a company that has over 100 million users on their platform… Uber is going to aggregate demand amongst all of the various players that have different types of autonomous vehicles on the road. The consumer is going to want one-stop shopping… I think Uber is going to be the central demand aggregator, and that's the bet that I'm willing to make." So we don't just get to grade Gerstner. We get to grade Gerstner *versus* Josh Brown. Keep score on both. --- ## What Happened Let's go to the numbers. From the call date (Nov 21, 2024) through the most recent close in this review (Sept 22, 2026), about 22 months, plenty of time to judge: | | Nov 21, 2024 | Sept 22, 2026 | Return | |---|---|---|---| | Tesla (TSLA), the buy | $339.64 | $378.90 | +11.6% | | Uber (UBER), the sell | $69.64 | $69.89 | +0.4% | | S&P 500, the benchmark | 5,948.70 | 7,764.64 | +30.5% | Read that table slowly, because it tells three different stories at once. *Story one: the pairs trade technically worked.* Tesla returned +11.6%, Uber returned essentially zero (+0.4%). So Gerstner sold the flat stock and bought the one that went up. On the narrow question, will Tesla beat Uber, he was right, by about 11 percentage points. A win is a win. *Story two: it was a terrible use of the money.* Both stocks got destroyed by the benchmark. The S&P 500 rose 30.5% over the same stretch. Tesla lagged the plain-vanilla index by roughly *19 points*; Uber lagged by *30 points*. In other words, Gerstner rotated out of one market-lagging stock and into another market-lagging stock. If he'd taken the Uber proceeds and bought an S&P index fund instead of Tesla, he'd have nearly tripled his gain. This is the uncomfortable part the raw "I was right, Tesla beat Uber" framing hides. *Story three, and this is the juicy one, the specific prediction he made was flat wrong.* Remember, he didn't just say "Tesla beats Uber someday." He said the optics would be good for Tesla and tough for Uber "over the next few months." Here's what those next few months actually looked like: * *Tesla first made him look like a genius.* It kept ripping after the call and peaked at *$479.86 on Dec 17, 2024, up 41%* in under a month. If he'd been grading himself at Christmas, this would've been a victory lap. * *Then Tesla fell apart.* As Musk dove into DOGE and government cost-cutting, the brand took political damage, showrooms got protested, deliveries slid, and the stock cratered. By *April 8, 2025, Tesla was at $221.86, down nearly 35% from the call.* * *Meanwhile, the stock he sold went the other way.* On that same April 8 low for Tesla, Uber was down just 6.6%. Uber then climbed all the way to *$100.10 by October 6, 2025, up nearly 44%* from where Gerstner dumped it. The "optics are going to be really tough for Uber" prediction aged like milk. * *And the robotaxi launch didn't rescue the trade.* At the launch window (late June 2025), Tesla was up a measly 2.7% from the call while *Uber was up 22.4%.* The exact catalyst Gerstner said would be good for Tesla and bad for Uber arrived, and Uber was beating Tesla by 20 points into it. *What about the product call?* This one he actually nailed. Tesla did launch a limited robotaxi service in Austin around *June 22, 2025*, right at the end of "Q2 of next year," exactly as he predicted on both podcasts. Credit where due: the timing forecast was good. But it was a small, geofenced pilot with a safety monitor riding along and a few dozen cars, not the sweeping, stock-moving event the bull case implied. The launch happened; the payoff didn't. --- ## The Verdict: Mixed Let's be honest and precise, because "he was right, Tesla beat Uber" and "he got smoked by the index" are both true, and only grading one of them would be dishonest. *What he got right:* - The relative call. Tesla (+11.6%) did beat Uber (+0.4%) over the full window. The rotation, judged purely as "which of these two stocks do I want to own," was correct by about 11 points. - The product-timing call. Robotaxi did launch in Q2 2025, just as he said on two different podcasts the same day. *What he got wrong:* - The near-term "optics" prediction, which was the actual reason he gave for the trade, was backwards. In the months right after the call, Tesla crashed about 35% and Uber climbed toward $100. He said the exact opposite would happen. - The opportunity cost was brutal. Rotating *into* Tesla left him about 19 points behind a plain S&P 500 fund. When your winning trade loses badly to an index fund, it isn't really a winning trade. - Josh Brown's counter has aged better. His "Uber is the demand aggregator and robotaxis won't dethrone it" argument has held up so far. Uber has kept its riders, struck partnerships across autonomous-vehicle providers, and its stock outran Tesla through the entire robotaxi launch. Net: *Mixed.* This is the classic "right thesis, wrong trade" outcome. The pairs call squeaked out a win on the tape, but the reasoning that actually mattered, the near-term catalyst timing and the idea that robotaxi would hurt Uber, was wrong, and the money would have done far better sitting in the index. Gerstner is a terrific investor; this was a mediocre call dressed up as a slam dunk. --- ## Have They Changed Their Tune? Quietly, yes, mostly by changing the subject. Across his many 2025 and 2026 podcast appearances, Gerstner has said remarkably little about the Tesla-over-Uber rotation he was so animated about in November 2024. There's been no victory lap and no mea culpa. Instead, his public stock enthusiasm migrated almost entirely to a different corner of the market: semiconductors and AI infrastructure. On CNBC's Halftime Report in May 2026 he was calling Nvidia "terribly undervalued" and "the cheapest multiple in a decade," talking up memory-chip names like SK Hynix and Micron, and hyping the SpaceX IPO. Tesla and Uber barely came up. By his most recent big appearance, All-In, *"Brad Gerstner: No AI Bubble, Semis Eat the Nasdaq & AI's Take Off Problem"* (Sept 17, 2026), Uber shows up only as a throwaway example of AI-driven margins, not as a stock pick: "Every company I talk to, Uber says we're going to grow 20%. We're not going to grow headcount… That is margin expansion." That's a long way from "we rotated out of our remaining Uber because the optics are going to be really tough." The stock he sold is now something he cites approvingly as a business, just not one he'll say he wishes he'd kept. To his credit, he did give himself that "I may be buying this stock tomorrow or in a month" escape hatch on the original call, so he's not on record doubling down on a loser. But the honest read is that he moved on to a trade that worked (AI semis) and let the one that didn't fade into the background. --- ## Running Scorecard, Brad Gerstner | Ticker | Call date | Show, Episode (date) | Prediction | Outcome | Grade | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | TSLA long / UBER sold | 2024-11-21 | CNBC Halftime Report, "Brad Gerstner Joins us Live in San Francisco 11/21/24" (2024-11-21) | Sold all Uber, rotated into Tesla; robotaxi launches "Q2 of next year"; optics good for TSLA, tough for UBER "over the next few months" | 11/21/24 to 9/22/26: TSLA +11.6%, UBER +0.4%, S&P +30.5%. Pairs call right (TSLA beat UBER by ~11 pts) but TSLA lagged the index by ~19 pts; near-term optics call wrong (TSLA -35% into April 2025, UBER hit $100 in Oct 2025). Robotaxi did launch in Austin ~June 22, 2025. | Mixed | *This is Gerstner's first appearance in Track Record, so the scorecard starts here and builds from now on. This retrospective grades the November 21, 2024 call through the September 22, 2026 cutoff and does not grade subsequent performance.* --- ## Get the full transcripts on Matterfact This briefing was produced with Matterfact, which indexes the complete, full-text transcripts of 120M+ podcast episodes alongside SEC filings, earnings calls, and financial datasets. 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