Tesla trades higher after Musk has “lovely dinner” with President Trump
Tesla is up about 1.5% in premarket trading on Monday, as Elon Musk and President Trump start 2026 as they began 2025 — hanging out and being buddies, with Tesla’s CEO writing about his “lovely dinner” with Donald and Melania Trump over the weekend.
Considering Musk posted on X that “2026 is going to be amazing,” alongside a photo of him dining at Mar-a-Lago, the dinner appeared to be an indication that the Tesla CEO and Trump are back in one another’s good graces after a very public falling-out last year.
Better ties with the head of the US government is outweighing any negative sentiment about Tesla’s China business, after an update from China’s Passenger Car Association on Monday confirmed that Tesla’s shipments in the region dropped in 2025, down 7% from a year earlier to 851,732 vehicles.
Though Tesla’s December 2025 sales figure in China was actually solid, up 3.6% compared to December 2024, the year as a whole was a tough one for Tesla’s core business, as it ceded its crown as the world’s biggest EV maker to China’s BYD. Indeed, on Friday Tesla announced that its annual deliveries had dropped for a second straight year, in contrast to BYD’s 28% jump in EV annual sales last year.