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Axios
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On Elon Musk's bad day, Tesla plummets and X experiences outages. Gannon, Pete facebook (opens in new window)
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email (a new window will open). Elon Mush, holding a cup of coffee. Mr. Elon Musk Getty Images/Anna Moneymaker, photo Tesla shares cratered Monday on mounting fears of a sales slowdown, pushing the stock firmly below the starting level of its "Trump bump."
The big picture: It was a bad day for Elon Musk, whose messaging platform X was also disrupted by a "massive" cyberattack.
While Tesla is facing plenty of challenges of its own, Musk's divisive role as President Trump's head of DOGE seems to increasingly be taking a toll on his business interests.
By the numbers: Tesla shares fell more than 15% Monday. Since their peak on December 23, they have lost $700 billion in market value, or more than 53%. The value of the business has fallen by more than 11% since Trump's election. Context: Tesla's fall has been particularly steep, despite the fact that stocks as a whole have suffered in recent weeks due to threats of tariffs, renewed worries about inflation, and concerns about slowing growth. It's suffered the biggest decline of any stock in the S&P 500 year-to-date, per FactSet.
What he's saying: Trump said on Truth Social early Monday that he is "going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American," though the president didn't say what kind of Tesla he planned to buy.
"Why should he be punished for putting his extraordinary abilities to use to assist in MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???" Trump added, making what appeared to be a reference to his collaboration with DOGE to reform the federal government and reduce its workforce. The report written by UBS analyst Joseph Spak stated that there were signs of Tesla's sales softening and that sales declines were likely to impact both the company's first-quarter delivery targets and full-year profit forecasts, which spooked investors on Monday. Separately, Baird analyst Ben Kallo said on CNBC that demand for Tesla vehicles could be hurt by recent reports of vandalism reportedly linked to political backlash.
This is all coming in context of a tech wipeout Monday amid widespread — and growing — recession fears, which drove the Nasdaq down 4% on the day.
On Monday, Musk was also dealing with what he described as a "massive" and "coordinated" cyberattack on X, and throughout the day, tens of thousands of users reported experiencing outages. What we're watching: Although the attack's specifics, including its motivation, weren't known at the time, a lot of social media users were discussing it in the same light as the Tesla demonstrations, suggesting a political motive. In a response to one of these posts, Musk wrote on X, "We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources," which appeared to elevate the theory. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."
He said later in an interview with Fox Business that the attacks appeared to be coming from Ukraine. Go deeper: Musk quotes Monty Python to shrug off $16 billion loss
Editor's note: This article has been updated with comment from President Trump.