Tesla’s Five Year Stock Price Turns Negative
Once a Wall Street darling, Tesla now faces a reckoning as a perfect storm of competition, political drama, and shifting markets has quietly erased years of gains for loyal shareholders.
What was once among America’s hottest stocks has now turned negative based on its five-year stock price. Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) share price is down 2%, while the S&P 500 is up 61%. One factor behind the slide was CEO Elon Musk’s role at the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), created in late 2024 by President Trump to cut waste from the federal government. The two men clashed over government policy in mid-2025, which didn’t help the share price either. However, ultimately it was the faltering of the EV industry that signaled the end of Tesla’s sales growth.
The early anxiety about Tesla sales began in May 2021. Ford (NYSE: F) committed to a $30 billion investment to grab a larger part of the US EV market. Although it failed badly, it showed that legacy car companies believed EV investments were necessary as buyers moved away from fossil fuel-powered cars. GM, along with Japanese, South Korean, and European car companies, was never as financially ambitious as Ford, but together they captured double-digit market share in the US.
Tesla’s sales in Europe were also healthy. However, in a mirror of Tesla’s competition problem in the U.S., the region’s largest car companies followed Ford and GM (NYSE: GM). Financially, their EV bets did not turn out much better than America’s two largest car companies.
What hurt Tesla the most was that the Chinese car market, the largest in the world, was swarmed with local companies. Eventually, 129 EV brands operated in China. Reuters reported that only 15 were expected to survive. However, market share was split up, and desperate price cuts meant to keep smaller companies in business affected the entire market.
Musk has not helped himself with his claims that Tesla is not a car company but a robotics, AI, and autonomous vehicle business. These projects have been slow to materialize, if they have materialized at all. Over three-quarters of Tesla’s revenue still comes from EV sales.
The most shocking thing about Tesla’s troubled stock price is that the company is still worth $1.6 trillion, said to be larger than the combined market caps of all other publicly traded car companies in the world. That is not much comfort to Tesla’s long-term shareholders
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
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A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
