A Star Strategist Betting on Robots and Flying Cars --- Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas made his name as an autos analyst. Now he has big predictions for what's coming.

 

“Adam Jonas compares his approach as a top researcher at Morgan Stanley to a lobster fisherman.

 

If he lays enough traps at the bottom of the sea, in corners that are otherwise ignored, he's likely to come back with something no one else has noticed.

 

The lobster analogy "is a way of engaging in ideas that the market has ignored because it thinks the probability is either too low or too long term," Jonas says.

 

The job Jonas has is about as far away from the crustaceans as Earth is from Mars. Jonas, 51, is the bank's chief robot strategist, a role it created for him in the fall. His actual title: global embodied AI strategist.

 

The role is a first for Morgan Stanley as it dives deeper into the boom in private markets, an increasingly lucrative area across Wall Street. The ultrawealthy are able to buy and sell shares of the buzziest private companies via invite-only transactions long before the companies list their shares on public stock exchanges. The number of public companies in the U.S. is half of its peak in the late 1990s.

 

Private companies have been traditionally overlooked in analyst coverage because of the dearth of reliable financial information and the lack of investment access for investors. Their growth has created demand for more in-depth analysis from Morgan Stanley's investor clients. Jonas, as well as longtime energy analyst Stephen Byrd, are among the top thought leaders at the bank positioned to seize the opportunity, according to a spokeswoman for the bank.

 

Jonas will guide the bank's clients on what he's calling the "Cambrian explosion of bots" -- a time in the not-so-distant-future in which fully autonomous vehicles, drones, humanoids and industrial robots grow large enough in population to rival the human race.

 

His theory is deceptive in its simplicity: Anything that can be automated will be automated, he says, even humans. American companies either build that future themselves or cede their future to the countries and companies that do.

 

"If we don't, someone else will," Jonas says.

 

In a report last month, Jonas forecast 1.4 billion in annual robot sales by 2050, bringing in $25 trillion in global revenue. Many of those, he says, will be drones or autonomous vehicles, though they will also include hundreds of millions of humanoids and home robots. Each will make decisions about how to move around the world without the input of humans.

 

Jonas started covering autos as an investment banker in 1996 out of college at the University of Michigan. He took over as Morgan Stanley's lead European auto analyst in London at age 28.

 

Then in 2008, Jonas met Elon Musk on a visit to the SpaceX rocket factory in Hawthorne, Calif. "I was kind of rewired," Jonas says of the meeting. "I understood how he could get really talented people with lots of capital to do crazy stuff that's impossible until it isn't."

 

In 2010, Jonas moved to New York where he took over global auto coverage for the bank. He soon made a name for himself as a Tesla bull, and a vocal critic of the slow-moving ways of American automakers.

 

He set a $70 price target for Tesla, nearly three times where the underdog automaker was trading. In that 2011 note, he called Tesla "America's Fourth Automaker," an affront to the Big Three in Detroit. That note cemented Jonas's provocative approach to the Wall Street analyst job. Today, with a market cap of $1.4 trillion, Tesla is larger than the following 22 automakers' market caps combined.

 

He became known for his out-of-the-box questions on corporate earnings calls. In 2015, after Jonas asked if Tesla would compete with Uber, Musk paused for so long before responding that TechCrunch called it an "awkward silence." In 2017, when he asked if Tesla would use SpaceX tech in its vehicles, Musk groaned. The Financial Times dubbed it "the time Adam got even Elon to roll his eyes at a question." A year later, Musk was promoting a new design for Roadsters with what he called "small rocket thrusters."

 

General Motors Chief Executive Mary Barra gave a shout-out to Jonas on his final earnings calls in October, as did Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley, who thanked Jonas for his "activist investor point of view."

 

"It certainly helped us be better managers and stewards of the company," Farley said.

 

Jonas says he always believes what he writes, but has taken an approach he describes as "provocative," with the goal of giving Morgan Stanley's clients a "punch in the brain." He hopes he gets people to think seriously about issues they may not have otherwise. "To create some productive anxiety," he says.

 

In December, Jonas and a team of about 30 analysts and researchers from across Morgan Stanley published the first in a series called "The Robot Almanac," a guide to future business opportunities as well as the many companies already working on such technology across industries from AI and software to supply chains and data centers.

 

Robotics hardware, now a $91 billion industry, will steadily grow to around $540 billion in annual revenue for 2030, then $2.7 trillion by 2035, before accelerating to $25 trillion in 2050, Jonas forecasts. The sale of software, services and maintenance, and the various supply chains could multiply these figures.

 

By then, the world will look a little different, he says. Jonas expects to see autonomous aircrafts buzzing past his windows on the 18th floor of Morgan Stanley's Time Square offices. Fully autonomous vehicles will pick up humans from work and drive them to homes where robotic AI assistants move from room to room for improved sound quality and voice recognition, he expects. His office will be full of robots too, he says.

 

The bank projects that in 2050, 10% of those robots will be in the U.S. and 28% will be in China with significant roboticization of industries like healthcare, logistics and agriculture.

 

In the long run, Jonas concedes, robots could displace human workers.

 

And it will be up to parents, governments and society to answer questions like, "What does it mean to be human," and to figure out how to "insure against unintended consequences," he said.

 

Like Musk, Jonas is influenced by the science fiction of writers like H.G. Wells. Jonas also likes the 1920s play "R.U.R" by the Czech playwright Karel Capek, which is credited with popularizing the word "robot." The play tells a story of sentient robots who rebel against human creators.

 

"Read this short play and you'll think twice before kicking a robot again," Jonas wrote in a November investor note.

 

Late last year, Jonas put down a $200 refundable deposit on a new humanoid robot called Neo, which its maker 1X describes as a home robot designed to automate chores.

 

Neo is scheduled for delivery late this year, with a total price tag of $20,000. The robot isn't fully autonomous yet, so when it's sweeping, dusting or unloading the dishwasher, there's a chance a 1X employee at the company's headquarters will be remotely controlling the robot through a VR headset.

 

Jonas says this has made Neo a "controversial topic at the dinner table" in Westchester County, where he lives with his wife and three sons, the oldest of whom is about to start driving. His wife, Jonas says, is concerned about the family's privacy.

 

"I may have to bring it someplace else," Jonas says. "To be determined."

 

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Adam Jonas

 

-- Inspiring music: David Bowie, jazz, yacht rock and harder stuff like Nine Inch Nails

 

-- Reading: History and science fiction from the past. 'When The Sleeper Wakes' by H.G. Wells

 

-- Coffee order: Must be quick. Tall drip with skim milk

 

-- Best vacation: Spending time with family in Spain” [1]

 

1. EXCHANGE --- A Star Strategist Betting on Robots and Flying Cars --- Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas made his name as an autos analyst. Now he has big predictions for what's coming. Peterson, Becky.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 24 Jan 2026: B3.