Elon Musk taunts Tesla critics as stock soars to new highs
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Tesla’s stock leapt above $1,400 for the first time on Tuesday morning—a nearly 50 percent increase over the price just a week earlier. As of publication time, Tesla’s stock has slumped a bit to around $1,380. That’s still more than the stock was worth at any time before today and a six-fold jump from Tesla’s share price a year earlier.

The primary villains in Tesla’s mythology are “shorts”: investors who short-sell the company’s stock in hopes of profiting from a falling price. CEO Elon Musk has regularly taunted these critics about the company’s rising stock price. On Sunday, Musk gleefully announced that Tesla was selling “limited edition short shorts” on its website.

The shorts are red with gold trim, with a small Tesla logo on the side. “S3XY” is emblazoned across the back in large type. The shorts cost “only $69.420,” Musk wrote. As I write this on Tuesday morning, the shorts are sold out.

Tesla’s latest rally was kicked off by strong delivery numbers, announced last week, for the second quarter. Tesla’s deliveries were about 5-percent lower than their level a year earlier. Ordinarily, that would be nothing to celebrate. But it’s a strong showing compared to other car companies, most of which saw quarterly sales decline by double digits, year over year, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Last week, Tesla became the most valuable car company on Earth when its market value blew past Toyota. Wall Street now values Tesla at $250 billion, compared to $205 billion for Toyota. That despite the fact that Tesla’s manufacturing capacity is a small fraction of its established rivals. Tesla sold around 360,000 cars in 2019. Toyota sold 10.7 million.

But Tesla has big expansion plans. The company recently opened a factory in China and has plans to open a German factory in the next couple of years. Rumors indicate that Tesla is close to announcing a fourth factory in Texas. Tesla will need more manufacturing capacity to build the company’s growing lineup of vehicles, including the Model Y—introduced earlier this year—the Cybertruck, and an updated edition of Tesla’s Roadster sports car—both due out in the next year or two.