Wall Street analysts lowered their price targets significantly, expecting the stock to slide even further. Tesla’s losses have been so staggering over the last couple of weeks, the company has wiped out all of its gains since president Donald Trump was elected in November. Its stocks are currently down over 55 percent since hitting a record high in mid-December.
The carmaker’s CEO Elon Musk has felt the hurt too, wiping out over $120 billion of his net worth since reaching an all-time high late last year. Today alone, Tesla’s sliding stock has cost the entrepreneur a whopping $12 billion.
And the prognosis is grim. Sales are down 45 percent in Europe, a whopping 49.2 percent month in China, and even a catastrophic 70 percent in Australia in February. In the US, Tesla’s core market, sales are already down two percent in the first few months of 2025, indicating troubling days ahead.
Meanwhile, Musk has taken to his social media platform X-formerly-Twitter in a desperate attempt to drum up excitement for his embattled carmaker.
While Tesla’s stock was getting hammered, Musk was retweeting posts that gushed over Tesla being the “best car” and tales of the company’s plagued driver assistance feature saving them from a crash.
Anger over his endorsement of far-right extremism and two Nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration celebration has begun to spill over, with waves of protests and vandalism hitting Tesla dealerships across the country.
The man to blame for the outpouring of negative sentiment has since tried to play the victim card, while senselessly blaming other billionaires for Tesla’s disastrous stock performance.
“Heartfelt thanks to everyone supporting Tesla,” Musk wrote, “despite many attacks against our stores and offices.”
Tesla’s massive slide was accompanied by a widespread and extended outage of Musk’s social media platform X-formerly-Twitter.
Without offering any evidence, the billionaire blamed a “massive cyberattack.”
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk tweeted. “Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
Considering the sheer number of enemies Musk has made, it’s not exactly a stretch to imagine somebody had it out for the platform.
“What we’ve been seeing is consistent with what we’ve seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform,” Netblocks director Alp Toker told the BBC, referring to a type of attack that takes down websites by overwhelming them with traffic.
