Joby Aviation expects to begin air taxi operations later this year, with the United Arab Emirates likely to be its first market and the U.S. potentially following. The article highlights a $9 billion market cap, a 30% decline in the stock this year, and a 56% drop from 52-week highs, while arguing the valuation still looks stretched relative to the emerging eVTOL market's projected $28.6 billion size by 2030. Overall, the piece is cautiously optimistic on the industry but skeptical that Joby is cheap enough to justify outsized returns.
JOBY’s setup is less about “can the market be big?” and more about whether the company can convert a narrative asset into a regulated operating asset before capital markets re-rate the whole sector. The first flights in the UAE matter because a non-U.S. launch can de-risk commercial operations without waiting for the slowest certification path; if execution is clean, it can pull forward investor confidence by 2-4 quarters. The second-order benefit is to the broader eVTOL supply chain and adjacent infrastructure vendors, but that same dynamic can also crowd the space with imitators if JOBY proves the category is real.
The stock’s main vulnerability is duration mismatch: valuation still embeds a multi-year ramp, while the business likely remains pre-scale for at least several quarters. That creates asymmetric downside if certification slips, route utilization disappoints, or unit economics prove airport-hub dependent rather than citywide. In that scenario, the multiple compresses faster than the operating story can improve, especially because the market is already giving partial credit for success.
The contrarian angle is that the bearish case may also be too simplistic: early commercial flights do not need to prove mass adoption, only reliability and repeatability. A credible UAE launch could trigger a sentiment regime shift across the whole basket, even if revenue is immaterial near term. Near-term trading will likely be driven more by milestone headlines and financing optics than by fundamentals, so the stock can remain volatile for months despite limited underlying cash generation.
For NVDA and INTC, the article’s “better ideas” framing is incremental positive simply because it highlights relative scarcity of credible secular growth alternatives; that supports the AI/compute trade at the margin, though the impact is small. NFLX benefits only as a behavioral comparison point: investors are being reminded that category leaders with visible monetization deserve premium multiples, whereas JOBY is still in proof-of-concept mode.
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