Tesla stock’s bumpy road through 2024 was erased by Musk and Trump’s bromance

Tesla (
TSLA
) began 2024 with a bang.

In January alone, the company was slammed by a recall dealing with an Autopilot glitch,
reports
about CEO Elon Musk’s troubling drug habits, and increased competition
at home
and
abroad
. By February, the stock
was down 24%
, and it would be stuck as one of the worst
performers in the S&P 500
for the first quarter of the year and
part of the second
as Tesla enacted
mass layoffs
.

But all those losses have been more than erased. As of Dec. 30, even as Tesla’s value is slowly shedding some gains, the stock is up by more than 70% this year.

Here’s how it got there.

The first major boost to Tesla shares came in April after Musk
put off a meeting
with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to focus on his “very heavy Tesla obligations.” That turned out to be code for a
surprise visit to Beijing
, where he met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang.

That meeting paved the way for Tesla to chart a path to test its Full Self-Driving technology on state roads. About a month later, the automaker began preparing to register its driver-assist software with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Fast-forward another month and Shanghai began allowing Tesla to carry out limited testing of the software,
Reuters reported
, although FSD has not yet been cleared by regulators.

datawrapper-chart-uUA21

The next aid to Tesla came not from the company but from its investors.

In June, the vast majority of Tesla shareholders — both institutional and retail investors alike — voted to re-approve Musk’s 2018 compensation package, which gives the CEO the ability to
buy up to 304 million Tesla shares
at a pre-set price of $23.34. Tesla shares haven’t traded below $100 apiece since August 2020.

The vote was both a vote in favor of compensating Musk, who had technically gone unpaid since the plan was approved half a decade earlier, and a sign of confidence in his vision and importance to Tesla. Ahead of the vote, Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm
wrote
that “motivating someone like Elon requires something different” and that the package would help ensure he doesn’t depart Tesla for “other places.”

“Hot damn, I love you guys,” Musk said on June 13 after taking the stage at the shareholder meeting to a barrage of applause from the crowd.

Unfortunately for Tesla and its investors, the vote did not sway Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, who, in January, had shut down Musk’s roughly $56 billion package. After again rejecting the package, McCormick on Dec. 13
opened the 30-day window
for Tesla to appeal her ruling to the Delaware Supreme Court.