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Musk Trump Tesla Feud Narrative Twist Stock
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Analyst: Musk-Trump feud a major twist in Tesla’s stock market story

And for Tesla, narrative matters more than fundamentals.

Matt Phillips

Barclays’ Dan Levy is one of the few brave Wall Street analysts willing to wade into the Trump-Musk spectacle, publishing a note Friday with thoughts on how to make market sense of the remarkable public bust-up that wiped $150 billion or so from Tesla. Levy, who has an “equal weight” rating on the shares, writes:

“We believe the broader significance of the exchange is that it reflects a reversal of Tesla’s narrative, which had been at a high.

As a reminder, Tesla’s strength post election was largely off the excitement of Elon Musk’s connection with Donald Trump.

We’d argue that the move was likely overkill, but given the strength of the stock in the face of weak fundamentals, we are not fully shocked that an optical blow to the narrative drove a move like this...

We remain slightly negatively biased on the stock — it’s still possible that the Robotaxi launch underwhelms. And perhaps more importantly, we believe the stock hasn’t fully confronted weak fundamentals / challenged auto sales, which don’t seem to matter… until they eventually matter.”

For much of the last year, the ability of Tesla shares to shake off a long string of staggeringly bad news on its core automotive business left fundamentally minded analysts flummoxed. And in many ways, as Levy commented, the right comp for Tesla is bitcoin or some other crypto asset, which has no actual business and trades on market vibes.

That’s because markets are not just bloodless discounting machines constantly calculating the potential for profits over the next 12 to 18 months. They’re also a human institution. And when humans are involved, stories matter. This is even more the case for stocks with a large chunk of individual investors holding shares. About 30% of Tesla shares are thought to be owned by retail traders.

Over the last decade, no one has been more of a master manipulator of market narratives than Elon Musk, who’s combined his extremely online public profile and fantastical visions of the future with periods of actually impressive business performance. The result? A remarkably high — and more or less durable — market premium for the shares.

Then Musk went to DC. As a result of his immersion in right-wing politics and identification with Trump, the story surrounding Tesla has shifted, as Levy said, to one where Tesla’s strength is largely derived from Musk’s personal connection with Trump. It nearly doubled in value in the month after the election, making it a major Trump trade.

With that connection ruptured — perhaps permanently — die-hard Tesla bulls are in the market for a new narrative.

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President Trump says that Nvidia can begin to sell its H200 chips to China, with 25% of proceeds going to US government

US President Donald Trump confirmed after the close on Monday that Nvidia will be allowed to ship its H200 chips to China, sending shares of the chip designer up more than 1% in the after-hours session.

Per the president, 25% of the proceeds will go to the US government. That’s a step up from the 15% that Nvidia and AMD had agreed to provide the government in exchange for receiving export licenses to sell their H20 and MI308 chips to China.

Earlier in the day, Semafor reported that the Department of Commerce would soon give the go-ahead to export these powerful chips produced by Nvidia to China, which has been a core priority of the chip juggernaut, citing a source with “knowledge of the plan.” Bloomberg reported on November 21 that such a move was being considered.

The chip designer’s stock surged on the news, while Advanced Micro Devices also caught a bid.

H200s are the most advanced chips from the Hopper line, which was Nvidia’s leading offering prior to Blackwell.

The Chinese government has blocked the import of less powerful chips such as the H20, while China hawks in Washington, DC, have been hesitant to allow the export of the defining technology of the AI era to a rival emerging superpower, introducing a bill in the Senate last week to limit China’s access to chips.

Nevertheless, China’s tech industry has managed to produce models from DeepSeek and Alibaba that compete globally.

Shipments of these chips are “reviving a key data-center revenue stream and potentially restoring $10-$15 billion annually,” wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kunjan Sobhani and Oscar Hernandez Tejada. “The H200 — offering 5-7x faster performance, 50% more memory, and over 2x the average selling price of the H20 — would likely become the highest-end GPU that Chinese buyers can legally procure, reopening a significant high-margin channel.”

H200s are the most advanced chips from the Hopper line, which was Nvidia’s leading offering prior to Blackwell.

The Chinese government has blocked the import of less powerful chips such as the H20, while China hawks in Washington, DC, have been hesitant to allow the export of the defining technology of the AI era to a rival emerging superpower, introducing a bill in the Senate last week to limit China’s access to chips.

Nevertheless, China’s tech industry has managed to produce models from DeepSeek and Alibaba that compete globally.

Shipments of these chips are “reviving a key data-center revenue stream and potentially restoring $10-$15 billion annually,” wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kunjan Sobhani and Oscar Hernandez Tejada. “The H200 — offering 5-7x faster performance, 50% more memory, and over 2x the average selling price of the H20 — would likely become the highest-end GPU that Chinese buyers can legally procure, reopening a significant high-margin channel.”

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SpaceX valuation chatter lifts satellite stocks

Satellite stocks rose early Monday, riding a wave of excitement about recent reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s satellite startup, SpaceX, is shooting for an $800 billion valuation as it launches a secondary share sale.

EchoStar and Rocket Lab rose, partly in response to the report.

William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma wrote that the valuation news has positive implications for owners of satellite spectrum rights.

If the reported valuation is ultimately achieved, it would be a mark-to-market moment suggesting that traditional satellite spectrum rights are worth more than the market had previously assumed.

That likely explains some of EchoStar’s outperformance on the day. As a legacy provider of satellite-based television services — such as Dish Network — it is a large owner of that spectrum, and has recently been an opportunistic seller of those assets, including to AT&T and SpaceX.

But the market doesn’t seem to like the implications for AST SpaceMobile, which has been trying to build up its portfolio of spectrum rights to compete as a seller of space-based services directly to consumers.

Higher spectrum right prices mean AST will have to cough up more cash as it competes with a Musk-controlled, $800 billion satellite gorilla.

William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma wrote that the valuation news has positive implications for owners of satellite spectrum rights.

If the reported valuation is ultimately achieved, it would be a mark-to-market moment suggesting that traditional satellite spectrum rights are worth more than the market had previously assumed.

That likely explains some of EchoStar’s outperformance on the day. As a legacy provider of satellite-based television services — such as Dish Network — it is a large owner of that spectrum, and has recently been an opportunistic seller of those assets, including to AT&T and SpaceX.

But the market doesn’t seem to like the implications for AST SpaceMobile, which has been trying to build up its portfolio of spectrum rights to compete as a seller of space-based services directly to consumers.

Higher spectrum right prices mean AST will have to cough up more cash as it competes with a Musk-controlled, $800 billion satellite gorilla.

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Marvell sinks after Benchmark cuts company, saying that it lost its Amazon custom chip design business

Over the past two trading days, Marvell Technology has faced vexing questions about its relationship with its top two custom chip hyperscaler customers.

Shares are tumbling, down 9% as of 10:21 a.m. ET.

Late last week, The Information reported that Microsoft, its second-biggest custom chip buyer, was in talks to shift that business from Marvell to Broadcom.

Now, Benchmark analyst Cody Acree thinks that Marvell’s largest custom chip customer, Amazon, has done the same, writing that “we now have a high degree of conviction that the company has lost both Amazon’s Trainium3 and 4 designs to its Taiwanese competitor, Alchip.”

Acree downgraded Marvell to “hold” from “buy,” recommending that investors take profit after its post-earnings bounce.

(Harlan Sur at JPMorgan, for what it’s worth, does not believe this is the case, pointing to Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial AI as providing key technology that aligns the company with Amazon’s future chip design needs.)

During the conference call that followed earnings, Sur asked Marvell CEO Matt Murphy about its role with Amazon chips going forward.

“What I would say, which is incorporated into our numbers, is that our product transition from where we are today with our lead XPU customer to the next one is baked into all the numbers I gave you. And yes, I got the backlog, and I got the orders, and we got great visibility there,” Murphy said.

Murphy’s answer was not quite definitive, according to Acree, who thinks that Marvell’s revenue forecast is being “driven by expected continued Trainium2 volumes and a Kuiper low-earth orbit engagement and not the successful transition to Trainium3 designs that many on the sell-side have concluded.”

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Structure Therapeutics posts mid-stage weight-loss pill data in line with Eli Lilly rival

Structure Therapeutics soared in early trading after it reported mid-stage results for its weight-loss pill that were roughly in line with Eli Lilly’s competing product.

The San Francisco-based biotech reported that patients lost roughly 11.3% of their body weight on a lower dose of the pill, aleniglipron, in a mid-stage study. That puts it roughly in line with Lilly’s competing pill, orforglipron, and slightly below Novo Nordisk’s oral Wegovy.

Both Lilly and Novo’s pills are awaiting regulatory approval and are expected to go to market next year. While the weight-loss numbers were encouraging, Structure’s pill did report higher rates of side effects like nausea and vomiting.

Investors have been closely watching drugmakers’ once-daily pills, which could replace the weekly injections currently on the market. While pills tend to be less effective than shots, they are less expensive to manufacture than prefilled injection pens and are more inviting to squeamish patients.

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