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Tesla’s terrible ride in 5 charts

From stock price declines to S&P ranking, a look at Tesla’s performance this year.

3/11/25 9:36AM

2025 hasn’t been a good year for Tesla, whose CEO, despite rubbing shoulders with the president of the United States, has been running his businesses “with great difficulty.”

Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company has erased all of the epic gains it made since President Donald Trump’s election — at one point the stock was up more than 90% — and the Trump bump has turned into a Trump slump.

Yesterday’s 15% decline represented the biggest daily drop in Tesla’s stock price since 2020, back when there was a global pandemic, supply chain chaos, and the S&P failed to induct the car company onto its titular list of 500 blue-chip companies.

Indeed, Tesla, which has since made it onto the S&P 500, is the worst-performing stock on the list in 2025. It’s down 45% since the start of the year.

One reason? Tesla sales have mostly been declining around the world. In February, sales dropped in China and across Europe. While sales in the US appeared to buck the trend last month, they rose about as much as they had declined the month before, pretty much canceling out sales growth so far this year.

Forward-looking estimates don’t look much brighter, as analysts’ sales forecasts keep dropping. FactSet consensus estimates peg Tesla’s 2025 deliveries at just shy of 2 million, but individual firms lately have been even less flattering. Yesterday UBS said it expects Tesla’s sales to drop to 1.7 million this year, a 5% decline year over year and certainly not the “return to growth” Tesla has predicted.

And things could certainly get worse if, say, Trump finally decides to revoke the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. A recent survey by insurance comparison website Insurify found that more than a third of Tesla owners wouldn’t have purchased their vehicles without it.

Jon Keegan

great scott!

Clash of the titans: Here are the biggest AI data center projects

Hyperion, Colossus, Prometheus, and Stargate. Our guide to the GPUs and gigawatts that make up the largest AI infrastructure projects in the industry.

Man and Girl Walking Through Aisle of Computers

Rani Molla5h

Meta launches federal super PAC to fight state AI policy proposals

Meta has launched a federal super PAC called the American Technology Excellence Project, spending “tens of millions” of dollars to fight what it considers “onerous AI and tech policy bills across the country,” Axios reports. Last month, Meta launched a California super PAC to back pro-AI candidates in the state.

Silicon Valley in general has been rushing behind pro-AI PACs, seeking to fight proposals like Senator Mark Kelly’s that would force AI companies to foot some of the bill for the societal ills they cause.

Exclusive: Meta launches super PAC to fight AI regulation

Rani Molla5h

Wedbush: Nvidia investment in OpenAI is a “watershed moment”

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives thinks Nvidia’s $100 billion investment in OpenAI says a lot of things about the importance of the moment we’re in. It’s a “watershed moment,” a “Ryder Cup moment,” and a “validation sign that the AI Arms Race is heating up among Big Tech firms.” In a note this morning, Ives wrote:

“We believe the AI Revolution is now heading into its next stage of growth as the tidal wave of Big Tech capex spending coupled by enterprise use cases now exploding across verticals is creating a number of AI winners in the tech world. The last few months we have seen a major validation moment for our AI Revolution bull thesis as the cloud stalwarts Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are leading the charge on this unprecedented spending cycle. Nvidia’s recent robust earnings and demand commentary from the Godfather of AI Jensen speaks to the evolution of AI spend now spreading beyond Big Tech to governments, enterprises, energy capacity, and overall infrastructure build outs around the globe.”

He does not consider it a bubble — or at least not yet. “While there are worries about an ‘AI Bubble’ and stretched valuations we continue to view this as a 1996 Moment for the Tech World and NOT a 1999 Moment,” Ives wrote, suggesting the situation is more like the early days of the internet, when there was a lot of investment in internet companies and a lot of experimentation — and when the dot-com bubble bursting was still a few years off.

If having multiple CEOs is better for stock market returns, Oracle is quadrupling down

But buyer beware: the last time Oracle had co-CEOs, shares underperformed.

Nate Becker9/22/25

Rani Molla9/22/25

Ives raises Apple price target to Wall Street high of $310, citing a “real upgrade cycle” for iPhones

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives raised his Apple price target to $310 from $270 thanks to “early strong demand signs” for the iPhone 17, which he says is tracking 10% to 15% ahead of the iPhone 16 at this point.

That $310 price target is the highest among Wall Street analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Ives said the Street’s estimate of about 230 million iPhone unit sales for Apple’s upcoming fiscal year is conservative and instead thinks the company is on track to sell 240 million to 250 million units in FY26. Ives wrote:

“The combination of a pent-up consumer upgrade cycle with our estimates of 315 million of 1.5 billion iPhones globally not upgrading their iPhones in the last 4 years, coupled with some design changes/enhancements have been the magical formula out of the gates.”

Sherwood News reported last week that redesigned iPhone models, which went on sale Friday, are seeing more interest than they have in three years — a phenomenon we speculate might have less to do with the iPhone itself and more to do with a natural upgrade cycle, as the rush of phones purchased in 2020 and 2021 become obsolete.