TSLA: Tesla Stock Plunges 15% — Widest Drop in 5 Years — as Musk Loses $29 Billion

Shares of the EV maker have fallen every week since Musk entered the White House. It’s down 55% from its January record.

🥴 Worst Day in Five Years

• Tesla stock TSLA was the biggest loser on Tuesday, sinking as much as 15%. To be fair, the whole market was plunging. But Tesla really stood out as shares suffered their worst single-day performance since September 2020 (that was five years ago?!). The slide cost it about $130 billion while Tesla chief Elon Musk got $29 billion poorer.
• Tesla has now washed out more than 55% from its record valuation hit on December 17 — that’s roughly an $800 billion chunk of its market cap. Musk has lost $180 billion over the same time span.

😵 Musk’s Troubles

• The sell-off caps (for now?) a very miserable, bruising and disappointing showing from the electric-car maker. Ever since Trump became President on January 20, Tesla hasn’t had a winning week. Instead, it logged a seven-week losing stretch — the longest since shares floated on the Nasdaq in 2010.
• It hasn’t been an easy ride for Elon Musk, who’s spreading disruption in the White House and beyond as a “special government employee.” Outside of his political life, Musk has witnessed two SpaceX explosions in a row, several X outages on Monday and, apparently, Tesla shares getting slammed to the ground.

🤕 Tesla’s Brand Erosion

• Musk said in an interview that aired after-hours Monday that he’s running his Tesla business “with great difficulty” while juggling his cost-cutting and controversial actions at DOGE. “Unless we’re stopped, we will get to $1 trillion of savings,” Musk predicted. Some of DOGE’s largest cost cuts have been deleted from the website and Musk has admitted they will “make mistakes.”
• Some analysts say that Tesla is suffering from brand erosion over Musk’s political chainsaw, slashing more than 10,000 jobs since February and closing down whole departments. More recently, Musk called on the US to quit NATO “now” as it “doesn’t make sense for America to pay for the defense of Europe.”