This week saw some major success for Tesla stock on the market! After a period of decline spanning six months, Tesla’s share price surged 33% – marking their best performance since May 2013 and second best on record. On Friday, the stock rose an additional 11%, closing at $177.88.
The surge was in part due to positive fourth-quarter earnings report from CEO Elon Musk, who projected that production this year could reach 2 million vehicles with demand to match. The company is sticking to its original forecasts for 50% compound annual growth rate over a multi-year period.
Is the Tesla stock move isolated, or a broader market turn?
The rally also coincided with a broader upturn in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq markets. Other US-based electric vehicle makers saw similar rises in their own share prices, while Lucid experienced a 43% spike on rumors that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund was planning to take the company private.
Some of Tesla’s losses last year have been attributed to CEO Musk diverting much of his focus to Twitter, which he acquired for $44 billion in October – reportedly leading to plummeting morale at the tech giant with mass layoffs and advertisers fleeing. The EV automaker remains the second most shorted stock in US markets, and despite this week’s surge active short selling continues with investors betting on a reversal of fortunes soon. All eyes will be on Tesla as we look forward to more success for them in the near future!
What did Elon say to give markets confidence?
“Tesla has seen the strongest orders this year than ever in our history,” said Musk to investors on Wednesday. He also commented that orders are currently coming in at “almost twice the rate of production”, resulting in increased Model Y prices.
“I think there is a large number of people who want to buy a Tesla but cannot afford it, so this price change really makes an impact on the regular consumer,” Musk noted.
“At Tesla, we have always had the goal of making cars available and affordable for as many people as possible, so I am glad we can do that now,” he added.
Speaking about self-driving capabilities, during an earnings call on Wednesday Musk mentioned Tesla had released FSD Beta for city streets to 400,000 customers in North America. He said that about 100 million miles of FSD city miles (not including highway driving) had been logged.
“Safety statistics were excellent before we released the FSD Beta,” said Musk.
Furthermore, the CEO stated almost all Tesla cars can have self-driving software uploaded to them and can be sold with “Full Self-Driving at essentially 100% gross margin.” He added that when their autonomous capability grows and eventually becomes fully autonomous it could result in one of the biggest asset value increases ever seen.
Analysts View on Tesla stock
Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, Dec 2022– “It would be easy for us (and other bulls) to throw in the towel here and view the near-term headwinds as too fierce to overcome for the stock to work in 2023”
The analyst then predicted that Tesla stock would move upwards in 2023, with a small caveat “this stock has bottomed in our opinion and works from here”, “However, any further Musk strategic missteps will be carefully scrutinized by the Street and further weigh on shares,”
Get the full Tesla performance report directly from their investor relations department.