Key insights
- Tesla is experiencing an eight-week losing streak, driven by weak Q1 sales, particularly in China where sales declined 16% YoY. The lack of positive catalysts, such as updates on Optimus version 3, is also contributing to the stock's underperformance. Seasonality tends to affect Tesla's performance negatively at the start of the year. This weakness in a mega-cap stock can have a slightly negative impact on overall market sentiment.
Tesla stock (TSLA) may appear to have gained nearly 38% over the last year, but the EV stock has still fallen over 20% in 2026 year-to-date and is set for an eight-week losing streak.
Yahoo Finance Senior Autos Reporter Pras Subramanian discerns whether there are possible catalysts for investors that could lift the stock.
Tesla's rough start to the year rolls on. and Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian joins me here with more.
Pras, I'm going to go to the Wi-Fi Interactive here. I want to show I've been talking about this eight-day rally quite a bit. Here we have the mega caps over the last eight days. You're going to notice one red rectangle. That is Tesla down 2 and a half%. It is not participated.
Now, this is a two-year chart. You can see it's up 100%, so the price has doubled over that time period. I want to point out a nine-week losing streak that they had in early 2025. Stock was down 55%.
Now we've got nine weeks and the stock's down about 30%. Now, admittedly before this was a great buying point, but the stock hasn't come down quite as much. I don't know, what's what's behind this Tesla weakness here?
You know, that this is a great chart because I I note that there's seasonality with Tesla, right? The start of the year it always tends to underperform and in this case the last two years quite badly. Uh so this year we're down about 24%, 23% start of the year. Not great and in the midst of an eight-week losing streak. We'll find out today at the close, but I think it will hit that.
Uh so what's going on here, right? So usually it's it's it's it's low sales for Tesla in the first in Q1. not a great Q1 report. They have some bad numbers in China here. Uh Chinese sales down 16% year of year, not great in Q1. So they have some you have some bad sort of actual fundamental news. Uh but I think there's the lack of catalyst, right? This is a big deal, right?
Supposed to see Optimus version 3 sometime this month. We have no news on when that's going to be. This is a robot by the way hasn't been sold yet in public. This is what Cory Johnson told me yesterday.
I like the videos, though.
Great videos, bartending videos, all kinds of stuff. Robotaxi updates. We know they're operating in San Francisco and Austin. still with the safety driver in some cases, but we haven't removed that. It's not fully unsupervised yet. That's sort of a big deal. When's that going to happen?
And that Tesla cheap BB, we talked about that.
Model Q.
Model Q, Model 2, that's that's positive, but didn't really get it didn't really get a lift yesterday because I think people are sort of wondering, well, this has been rumored for years and where is it?
Uh, we have earnings come up on the 22nd, that'll be a big sort of movement mover probably for them, maybe to the downside. We'll see, but yeah, it's just a a rough start for Tesla and usually that's the case for the start of the year for that stock.
All right, I want to ask you a bridge question because we're going to talk about SpaceX in a minute and I've heard some theories that Elon Musk, you know, he's merged the solar business with Tesla years ago and he was able to do that successfully. And there have been rumors that maybe at some point in the future after SpaceX's IPOd, after a while, he's going to join Tesla with SpaceX and then somehow throw X.com in there, you know, the xAI and the Grok and all that.
Do you think what are the odds that we end up with one Elon Musk company in the future?
You know, we've been hearing a lot of chatter about that. It seems like that might be something that he wants, but uh Jared, I mean, it's going to be a
All speculation.
Right. Right, right. Total speculation, but it's like we're talking about trillion dollar companies, right? Potentially.
Multiple trillion dollar companies.
And how do the mechanics work? How do you merge a Tesla with a SpaceX or the other
Very carefully.
Very carefully. Yeah. I think he would probably love that just to have it all under one umbrella, but I just kind of have to wonder, you know, because xAI now is is is part of SpaceX.
Okay.
And then xAI Tesla bought part of xAI preferred and so they're still they're intermixed there. So maybe there's some intermixing that can happen there with the different uh sub companies. But I I think in in in his dream world, yes, but I don't know how real that is with just the the mechanics of it all. these massive companies and we're talking about, you know, an IPO of SpaceX, which we'll talk about. That's going to be the biggest offering ever and you're telling me there's enough retail flow for that? I don't know.