Shares of Tesla dipped Monday to their weakest level since last May, extending 2024’s brutal selloff for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker as Tesla loses gas compared to its fellow big technology stocks.
Tesla’s stock fell as much as 6% to $175 before recovering slightly by market close to a 3.7% loss, bringing the limping auto titan’s year-to-date loss to a whopping 27%. That makes Tesla the worst-performing stock listed on the benchmark S&P 500 index.
Tesla’s 2024 decline began with a post-earnings plunge after the company missed Wall Street estimates for quarterly profit and revenue, but the latest selloff coincides with increased controversy surrounding Musk, who has clamored for significantly higher power within Tesla and taken to his X social media platform to spew fringe-right claims.
Heightened concerns about Tesla’s board’s ability to govern Musk peaked with a Saturday report in the Wall Street Journal alleging Musk and Tesla board members have taken illegal drugs together (Musk previously claimed his drug tests contained “not even trace quantities” of drugs or alcohol).
The allegations outlined in the Journal pose the latest “black cloud” on Tesla, partially attributing Monday’s stock dip to the salacious report.
Shares of Tesla have fallen more this year than the likes of Boeing, whose shares are down 21% in 2024 amid controversy about the safety of its commercial airplanes, and agricultural giant Archers-Daniels-Midland, whose shares are down 21% as it grapples with a probe into alleged accounting fraud.
For better and worse, Tesla stock has long been subject to the whims of the mercurial Musk, perhaps most famously proven during Tesla’s 65% selloff in 2022 as Musk offloaded a massive chunk of his Tesla holdings to fund his purchase of the social media platform now known as X. Tesla’s fortunes in 2024 are far worse than those of the other members of the “magnificent seven” tech stocks whose valuations ballooned last year. Apple is the only other member of the group whose shares are down year-to-date, at a far milder 2%, and Apple and Tesla are the only ones of the group not to report double-digit sales growth last quarter. Tesla’s profits declined 23% from 2022 to 2023, and analysts project negative bottom line growth again this year.
Musk is the world’s second-richest person with a net worth of $195 billion, according to our real-time estimates. Musk is about $55 billion poorer than he was at the end of 2023 thanks to Tesla stock’s drop and a Delaware judge’s axing of a $51 billion Tesla stock-based compensation for Musk last week
