Shares in electric vehicle maker Tesla sank to a new 52-week low on Tuesday, closing around $138 per share, or 8% lower for the day in an otherwise mixed day for stocks.
CEO Elon Musk tried to blame the sinking price partly on macroeconomic factors.
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Long-time Tesla bull Ross Gerber wrote in a tweet, “Tesla stock price now reflects the value of having no CEO. Great job tesla BOD – Time for a shake up. $tsla.” Gerber has launched an informal campaign to have fellow shareholders vote to appoint him to Tesla’s board of directors.
Musk replied, in a tweet, “As bank savings account interest rates, which are guaranteed, start to approach stock market returns, which are not guaranteed, people will increasingly move their money out of stocks into cash, thus causing stocks to drop.”
Elon Musk speaks during a press conference at SpaceX’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas on February 10, 2022.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
But Tesla’s stock has dropped more than other larger automakers since Musk announced his plans to buy Twitter in Apr. 2022. Since that date, Tesla shares are down 59%, versus 26% for Ford and 12% for GM. The S&P 500 is down 14%.
The Tesla chief has a lot of distractions, as Gerber notes: Musk has been stirring controversy as the new owner and CEO of Twitter, the social media giant which he acquired in a leveraged buyout in late October, and is also the CEO of a major defense contractor, SpaceX.
Musk sold billions of dollars of his Tesla holdings to finance the Twitter deal, including a $3.6 billion sale earlier this month.
He told Twitter employees he sold Tesla shares to “save” their business while proceeding to cut more than half of staff at the company and rolling out a host of policy changes, some of which he later reverses.
While Musk has been focused on his new role as “Chief Twit” since late October, Tesla has been offering discounts and incentives to sell cars in China, where it operates a major factory in Shanghai; fighting to make its new factories in Austin, Texas, and Brandenburg, Germany, efficient; and facing persistent supply chain challenges endemic to the auto industry, along with soaring energy prices in Europe which may reduce the appeal of a battery electric vehicle for many drivers.
Those, among other challenges, led Mizuho Securities and Evercore ISI to reduce their Tesla price targets on Tuesday.
Mizuho Securities analysts wrote in a note, that “near-term, we see potential weakness in Tesla sales as macro headwinds and a weaker consumer could drive lower demand for higher-priced EVs.” The firm is still bullish Tesla long-term, citing the company’s new factories as a competitive advantage, and new electric vehicle tax credits on the horizon in the US which could “accelerate demand” domestically. In China, some EV credits are expiring as of the start of 2023. The firm has a price target of $285 and a buy rating on shares of Tesla.
A Vanderbilt University assistant professor, Joshua White, who formerly worked as an economist for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, told CNBC, “Only some of the drop in Tesla’s value can be blamed on interest rates. Twitter overhang is one important component. China is another huge component. We still don’t know if China will be open all the way, and we see there is supply and demand pressure here in light of the increase in covid cases, and disruptions.”
He also said Elon Musk may have lost shareholders’ trust when he said in April that he didn’t plan to sell more of his Tesla shares, but went ahead and sold billions of dollars’ more.
“He seems to sell equity in really large blocks, say ‘I’m done and I’m not selling anymore.’ But talk is cheap. He says that and then sells more shares. So the more you say that and investors think he’s probably not done? The less confident they will be that the price is going to bounce back.”
Chegg seen at the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 13, 2025.
Danielle DeVries | CNBC
Chegg on Monday filed suit in federal district court against Google, claiming that artificial intelligence summaries of search results have hurt the online education company’s traffic and revenue.
The legal move come nearly two years after former CEO Dan Rosensweig said students engaging with OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant were cutting into Chegg’s new customer growth.
Chegg is worth less than $200 million, and in after-hours trading Monday, the stock was trading just above $1 per share. Chegg has engaged Goldman Sachs and will look at strategic options, including getting acquired and going private, President and CEO Nathan Schultz told analysts on a Monday earnings call.
Chegg reported a $6.1 million net loss on $143.5 million in fourth-quarter revenue, a 24% decline year over year, according to a statement. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $142.1 million in revenue. Management called for first-quarter revenue between $114 million and $116 million, but analysts had been targeting $138.1 million. The stock was down 23% in extended trading.
Google forces companies like Chegg to “supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google’s search function,” said Schultz, adding that the search company uses its monopoly power, “reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.”
Despite the suit, Chegg has its own AI strategy. It has drawn on Meta’s open-source Llama, as well as models from privately held Anthropic and Mistral, Schultz said. Chegg has also partnered with OpenAI, which the education company views as a competitor, alongside Google. The company reported that 3.6 million students had subscriptions in the fourth quarter, down 21%. Subscriptions include access to AI-powered learning assistance. Chegg also rents and sells textbooks.
AI Overviews, as Google’s artificial intelligence summaries are called, are available in the company’s search engine in over 100 countries, with more than 1 billion users, the company said in October. They show up above links to other pages in search results.
A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the company will defend itself against Chegg’s suit.
“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” the Google spokesperson said.
Chegg claimed that Google drew on Chegg’s collection of 135 million questions and answers on a variety of subjects in its model training data sets.
After training its models, Google can generate content that competes with information that publishers have on offer in search results, Chegg argued in its complaint. The online learning company included a screenshot of a Google AI Overview that borrows details from Chegg’s website but does not attribute the information. However, the relevant Chegg page does show up lower down in search results.
Chegg cited a federal judge’s ruling last August that Googleholds a monopoly in the search market. The decision came after the Department of Justice in 2020 filed its landmark case, alleging that Google controlled the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance.
Hims & Hers Health shares plunged 18% in extended trading on Monday after investors looked past better-than-expected revenue and earnings and focused instead on the disappointing gross margin.
Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG:
Earnings per share: 11 cents vs. 10 cents expected
Revenue: $481 million vs. $470 millionexpected
Revenue at the telehealth company increased 95% in the fourth quarter from $246.6 million during the same period last year, according to a release.
However, the company’s gross margin, or the profit left after accounting for the cost of goods sold, was 77%, while analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting 78.4%.
It is the second big stock drop for Hims & Hers in a matter of days. The shares tumbled 26% on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the shortage of semaglutide injection products has been resolved.
In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster GLP-1 medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The company was a breakout star within the digital health sector in 2024, in part because of the success of its popular new weight loss offering.
The company said its GLP-1 offering generated more than $225 million in revenue in 2024. The stock climbed about 200% for the year.
Compounded drugs are custom-made alternatives to brand-name drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs, and compounders are allowed to produce them when brand-name treatments are in shortage. The FDA said Friday that it will start taking action against compounders for violations in the next 60 to 90 days.
Hims & Hers said on the earnings call that as a result, compounded semaglutide will likely not be offered on the platform after the first quarter.
“We will have to start notifying customers in the coming month or two that they will need to start looking for alternative options on the commercial dosing,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum said on the call. “I would suspect, just being very direct, that a lot of those patients will try to go into the open market and try to secure a branded option in some form factor.”
Some patients might still be able to access compounded semaglutide if it is clinically necessary, the company added.
The company’s weight loss offerings will primarily be composed of its oral medications and the generic medication liraglutide, which it plans to introduce on its platform this year. Excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide, Hims & Hers said it expects it weight loss offering will generate at least $725 million in revenue in 2025.
Hims & Hers also offers treatments for skin care, mental health, sexual health and hair care.
Revenue for non-GLP-1 products increased 43% to $1.2 billion for the full year, “meeting our previous 2025 revenue target a year early,” Chief Financial Officer Yemi Okupe said in a release.
“The success we are experiencing is a direct reflection of our improving ability to democratize access to high quality, personalized care across each of our specialties,” Okupe said.
Net income climbed to $26.01 million, or 11 cents per share, from $1.25 million, or 1 cent per share, a year prior. The company reported adjusted earnings of $54.1 million, meeting analysts’ estimates, according to StreetAccount.
For the first quarter, Hims & Hers expects to report revenue of $520 million to $540 million, while analysts were expecting $497 million. Adjusted earnings will be between $55 million and $65 million for the period, the company said.
Hims & Hers will host its quarterly call with investors at 5:00 p.m. ET.
— CNBC’s Brandon Gomez contributed to this report.
As the clean energy economy expands, finding the minerals and metals that power it becomes increasingly critical. The answer might lie with artificial intelligence.
Electric cars, solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells all have one thing in common: the need for precious metals.
Historically, that’s required going through the arduous process of finding the metals and then getting them out of the ground. But new technologies from a slew of companies might be changing the game.
Kobold Metals, VerAI and a startup called Earth AI are in a race to get the metals to market as soon as possible. Earth AI combines AI-powered mineral discovery software with proprietary drilling technology. Its data goes back 50 years.
“We train our AI to learn from failures and successes of decades of hundreds of geologists that explored in the past to make much better predictions for where to look for metals in the future,” said Roman Teslyuk, CEO of Earth AI.
When the system finds what it thinks are metal deposits, Earth AI can drill down to verify it in just a tennis ball-sized hole. Teslyuk said that using this mining process takes half the cost and a fraction of the amount of time that was previously required. Individual annual mine revenues can range from $50 million to $3 billion, according to Mining Data Online.
“We drill down to 2,000 feet and grab a sample of rock that has never seen light, and the metals in that rock, they can build hundreds of millions of electric cars,” Teslyuk said. “They can turn our grid renewable. This rock can get us off hydrocarbons.”
Earth AI doesn’t explore around existing mines, but finds new areas and then sells that information to mining companies.
“The market for these minerals is massive,” said Jamie Lee, managing partner at Tamarack Global, an investor in Earth AI. “The way that they have approached this really caught our attention because there’s a there is a significant moat in their business model and the way that they’ve trained their large language model.”
Other investors include Y Combinator, Cantos Ventures, Scrum Ventures, Alpaca, Sparkwave Capital and Overmatch. The company has raised a total of $38 million.
Earth AI explores on its own, as well as with partners to find deposits faster. The company recently discovered one of the largest verified deposits of palladium in Australia using AI as part of a joint venture with Legacy Minerals.
CNBC Producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.