So today's the last trading day of the year (markets are closed tomorrow and Sunday's a wash anyway), and I've had Tesla's chart open in a tab since about 9:35 this morning like it's some kind of car crash I can't look away from. It closed a hair above $123. Back in early January it opened above $399. Do that math and you get a stock that's down roughly two-thirds in twelve months, which as far as I can tell is the worst calendar year Tesla's had since it went public back in 2010.
I bought a small, embarrassing chunk of TSLA in 2021 on a whim, the kind of thing you do at 1am after reading too many forum posts, and I have watched it do absolutely nothing but bleed since about April. I'm not going to pretend I sold at the top or that I have some clever hedge in place. I didn't. I just watched, the way you watch your own bank balance after ordering something you shouldn't have.
What's been interesting to me, and I don't think this gets said enough, isn't the number itself. Big stocks fall. It's why this one fell that I keep chewing on. Some of it's the same stuff hammering every growth name this year — rates, inflation, the whole macro mess nobody wants to read another paragraph about. Fine. But Tesla's decline has this extra ingredient none of the other automakers or big tech names have, and that ingredient is Elon spending his October through December running a social network into the ground in full public view.
Earlier this month there was an SEC filing showing he'd sold something like $3.6 billion worth of Tesla shares, on top of everything he'd already unloaded since April to help pay for Twitter. Every time one of these filings drops the stock takes another leg down, because the market reads it as exactly what it is: the CEO of a car company needing cash for a completely unrelated toy he overpaid for. And then there's the actual time cost. You can't run two companies, one of which is on fire, and have either of them look good. Tesla didn't have a bad quarter because the cars got worse. The Model Y is still the Model Y. It had a bad quarter because the guy in charge of it was tweeting poll results about his own job security at 2am instead of, I don't know, doing car company things.
I keep thinking about the framing people used earlier in the year, this idea that Musk running Twitter would somehow be additive, that the "free speech absolutist, first principles guy" energy would rub off on both companies. Instead what actually happened is the opposite kind of contagion. Twitter chaos leaked sideways into Tesla's valuation, dollar for dollar, in a way I genuinely don't think anyone modeled going into 2022. That's the part that's stuck with me watching this chart today. It's not "big tech had a rough year," it's a fairly direct, traceable line from decisions made about one company showing up in the market cap of a totally different one.
None of this means Tesla is a bad company or that the stock won't rip back up in six months, it very well might, I have no idea and neither does anyone confidently telling you otherwise on a finance forum. I just think it's a strange thing to sit with on the last trading day of the year: a company that shipped more cars than ever, that by most operational measures had a fine year, ending up down 65% because its founder's attention was somewhere else entirely for a quarter of it.
Small unrelated complaint while I'm in here: my brokerage app redesigned its portfolio screen sometime in November and now it takes three taps to see cost basis instead of one, and every time I go looking for it I lose another two minutes of my life to a UI decision nobody asked for. Not really Tesla's fault. Just noting it for the record, since I'm apparently keeping records of things going wrong this month.
Anyway. Champagne's in the fridge, chart's closed for the year, see everyone in 2023.