That is how much the stock market value of Tesla has rocketed since the presidential election, a vertiginous climb uninterrupted in recent days despite a disappointing financial report that would have sunk the stock of nearly any other company.
Investing in Tesla has long been a gamble. But this latest bet seems particularly risky. Musk says the true value of company lays in a future of Tesla robots, thousands of them possibly by the end of the year, and in unsupervised, driverless vehicles. Speeding all that along will be Trump, or so the story goes, who has given Musk an office in the White House and made him the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency tasked with shrinking the size of the government.
Sean Duffy has promised to cut excessive regulation on automakers as well as to come up with a single set of federal rules on self-driving technology to replace a patchwork of state-by-state ones that Musk has blasted for holding back development. Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said last week the company should feel an impact to its business because it sources parts from around the globe.
Then on Wednesday, Tesla reported revenue, profits and other key measures of financial health for the last quarter of all fell short of what analysts had expected. The stock climbed higher anyway. Besides the business, Tesla shareholders must always keep one eye on the CEO himself. On Inauguration Day in the U. He scoffed at the criticism, but the backlash was fierce nonetheless.
In Germany, an image of Musk making the salute was projected onto his massive Tesla factory outside Berlin in protest. In Italy, a communist youth group hung an effigy of Musk upside down in the same square in Milan where the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was strung upside down, too.
