Elon Musk. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Tesla shares cratered Monday on mounting fears of a sales slowdown, pushing the stock firmly below the starting level of its “Trump bump.”
The big picture: It was a bad day for Elon Musk, whose messaging platform X was also disrupted by a “massive” cyberattack.
By the numbers: Tesla shares fell more than 15% Monday. They’re now down more than 53% since their high on December 23, a loss of $700 billion in market value.
- The company is now more than 11% below where it closed the day Trump was elected.
Context: While stocks overall have taken a beating in recent weeks amid tariff threats, renewed inflation fears and concerns of slowing growth, Tesla’s fall has been especially steep. It’s suffered the biggest decline of any stock in the S&P 500 year-to-date, per FactSet.
Driving the news: Two negative analyst comments spooked investors Monday: UBS analyst Joseph Spak wrote in a report that there were signs of Tesla’s sales softening, and that sales declines were likely to impact both the company’s first-quarter delivery targets and full-year-profit forecasts.
- Separately, Baird analyst Ben Kallo said on CNBC that demand for Tesla vehicles could be hurt by recent reports of vandalism reportedly linked to political backlash.
- This is all coming in context of a tech wipeout Monday amid widespread — and growing — recession fears, which drove the Nasdaq down 4% on the day.
Meanwhile, Musk on Monday was also dealing with what he called a “massive” and “coordinated” cyberattack on X, with tens of thousands of users reporting outages throughout the day.
What we’re watching: While details of the attack, including a motivation, were not immediately known, many of social media were noting it in the same context as the Tesla demonstrations, implying a political motivation.
- Musk, responding to one such post, seemed to elevate the theory, writing on X: “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
- Later, in a Fox Business interview, he said the attacks appeared to come from the area of Ukraine.
Go deeper: Musk quotes Monty Python to shrug off $16 billion loss
