In Washington, DC, stocks of Elon Musk's Tesla dropped by more than 15.4% on Monday. It is the largest single-day decline in several years with a broad-based market sell-off sparked by potential recession concerns and uncertainty over President Donald Trump's tariff plans.
Shares registered their worst day since September 2020, closing more than 50% below their record closing high of $479 on December 17 last year.
Wall Street faced a major sell-off due to concerns over declining electric vehicle sales and politically driven protests against Mr. Musk over his involvement in the Trump administration.
The Tesla chief, however, seemed to dismiss the market concerns. Replying to a post on Twitter about the largest single-day drops in Tesla shares, Mr. Musk wrote, It will be fine long-term.
Tesla shares plunged 15.4% by the end of Monday's trading session. It was the largest single-day percentage decline since September 2020, when shares saw a decline of over 21% in a single day.
With this, Tesla stocks witnessed a total decline of 41.4% year-to-date so far in 2025. This involves a drop of over 36.6% in the past months. On March 10, Tesla stock fell more than half to a new market cap of $696 billion after reaching its all-time largest market capitalization of $1.5 trillion on December 17.
UBS lowered its price target on the stock to $225 from $259, citing lower delivery forecasts for the first quarter as it sees resulting from softer demand for Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.
This contributed to the sell-off, along with broader concerns about the US economy facing a recession and a widening trade war with President Trump's tariff threats.
On Monday, the S&P 500 ended the trading day 2.7% lower - its lowest closing level since September and its biggest daily percentage decline since December. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, dropped 2%, for its lowest close since November 4, the day before Trump was elected President. The Nasdaq Composite plunged 4% to a near six-month low.
Chief Executive of Tesla, Mr. Musk, has been facing protests and even vandalism at some of its dealerships. Last week, shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon, While in Boston, someone set fire to the company's charging stations. Authorities also arrested some violent protestors for rallying at a Tesla dealership in Lower Manhattan.
Additionally, a recent report found that Tesla car sales in Germany, Europe's largest market for electric vehicles, fell by 76% in February compared with a year earlier, sounding alarm bells for the entire European market.
The fall in Tesla stock came as its chief Musk is facing questions about how much attention he is paying to his businesses while serving as an adviser to President Trump. Over the week, Mr. Musk's business empire including Tesla, social media site - Twitter and the rocket master - SpaceX, has run into challenges.
As Tesla shares fell on Monday, Twitter users reported widespread outages. Before that, last week, a SpaceX rocket exploded in Florida during launch, showering some places with debris.
Mr. Musk was quick to blame the Twitter issues on a cyberattack stemming from Ukraine, without providing evidence. He posted on Twitter that Democratic donors were responsible for seeding protests against Tesla, again without evidence. In response to the SpaceX explosion, he said: "Rockets are hard."
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