Tesla stock has been on the rise, climbing as high as 6%, since the company’s CEO Elon Musk announced that he is dropping politics to focus on his companies–Tesla, xAI, and X. He announced over the weekend, before the recent SpaceX starship launch. According to a previous Washington Post report, Elon Musk will be stepping away from his role at DOGE to focus on his companies.
That change in priority came after another outage hit the blogging platform, X. The outage over the weekend left thousands of users locked out. Earlier that same week, the platform had suffered a data center failure. Since Elon bought the company in 2022, X has seen frequent breakdowns. He addressed it directly on X, writing, “As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” adding that the “failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
Tesla stock rises as Elon Musk says he wants to drop politics
The jump in Tesla shares comes after a wider pattern of Elon scaling down his involvement in political activities. During Tesla’s April earnings call, he said he would “significantly reduce” his time working for Trump’s government department. In the 2024 election cycle, Elon had thrown billions of dollars into Trump’s re-election campaign and into various conservative political projects. But when someone on X posted about DOGE and his government reform efforts, Elon simply responded: “did my best.”
In a separate interview at the Qatar Economic Forum, he said he plans to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations moving forward. Those comments, combined with the operational chaos at X and pressure mounting ahead of the next rocket launch, made it clear to investors that Elon had no room for distractions.
Despite the stock rally, Tesla is still dealing with blowback from Elon’s political entanglements. Protesters have appeared outside Tesla showrooms, and the brand continues to take hits globally. In April, Tesla sold 7,261 vehicles in Europe, which was a steep 49% drop from the same time last year. The data came from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.