Shares of the Elon Musk-led automaker Tesla have rallied in May despite recent poor car sales numbers for the company in China and Europe, as the billionaire CEO promised to focus more on his businesses than politics.

Tesla shares are on track for an increase of more than 20% for the month.

The stock is still down about 12% for the year. Apple is down about 21% year-to-date, the worst of all the megacaps.

The bounceback in May comes as President Donald Trump marks the end of Musk’s time as a “special government employee” at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency.

“This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Elon is terrific!”

Musk said on the most recent Tesla earnings call that his time spent running DOGE would drop significantly by the end of May, but that he plans to spend a “day or two per week” on government work until the end of Trump’s term.

Musk also planned to keep his office at the White House.

The New York Times reported Friday that while Musk was campaigning for Trump last year, he had been taking drugs “well beyond occasional use” and was “facing an increasingly turbulent family life.”

The Times noted it was unclear if that habit carried over to his time in the White House, when he was also juggling Tesla and the other companies in his business empire — including SpaceX and X owner xAI, his artificial intelligence company.

Tesla’s European sales dropped by half, year-over-year for April.

Tesla sales in China, another massive market for battery electric vehicles, were down by about 25% year over year in the first eight weeks of the current quarter.

The carmaker has faced protests in reaction to Musk’s ties with Trump, and his endorsement of Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD.

Pension fund leaders recently called out Tesla’s board in a letter, demanding that they rein in Musk, and require him to work a minimum of 40 hours a week on Tesla to fix what they called the current “crisis.”

Musk and Tesla have tried to re-focus on the company’s prospects in autonomous vehicle tech, humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence.

Bloomberg reported this week that Tesla plans to launch its long-delayed and much anticipated autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, on June 12th.

Tesla has not confirmed that start date, but has been promising to launch a robotaxi ride-hailing service in Austin before the end of June.

Musk told CNBC’s David Faber in a recent interview that Tesla would start with a small fleet of Model Y Tesla vehicles equipped with the company’s newest, Unsupervised Full Self Driving hardware and software.

Musk has been promising investors a robotaxi vehicle for years, and the company has ceded ground to Waymo in the U.S. The Alphabet-owned robotaxi venture recently surpassed 10 million paid, driverless ridehailing trips.

Shares of Tesla have also benefitted from the company’s stronger position, relative to other U.S. automakers when it comes to weathering tariffs.

Tesla operates two massive vehicle assembly plants domestically, one in Fremont, California and another in Austin, Texas, and has more North American-made parts in its cars than most of its competitors.

China is calling out the U.S. for “discriminatory restrictions” in its use of export controls in the chip industry, after the Trump administration accused the world’s second-largest economy of violating a preliminary trade deal between the two countries.

“Recently, China has repeatedly raised concerns with the U.S. regarding its abuse of export control measures in the semiconductor sector and other related practices,” China U.S. embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told NBC News.

It’s the latest escalation in the simmering trade war between the U.S. and China, particularly as it pertains to artificial intelligence and the infrastructure needed to develop the most advanced technologies.

China’s response comes after President Donald Trump said early Friday in a social media post that China had violated a trade agreement. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC in an interview that the “Chinese are slow rolling its compliance.”

On May 12, the U.S. and China agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed by either side. That agreement followed an economic and trade meeting between the two countries in Geneva, Switzerland.

“China once again urges the U.S. to immediately correct its erroneous actions, cease discriminatory restrictions against China and jointly uphold the consensus reached at the high-level talks in Geneva,” the embassy spokesperson said.

The statement didn’t specify any actions taken by the U.S. Earlier this month, China said the U.S. was “abusing” export controls after the U.S. banned American companies from importing or even using Huawei’s AI chips.

The U.S. has limited exports of some chips and chip technology to China as part of a national defense strategy dating back to the first Trump administration.

In 2019, President Trump cut off Huawei’s access to U.S. technology, which forced it to essentially exit the smartphone business for a few years before it could develop its own chips without use of U.S intellectual property or infrastructure. In 2022, the Biden administration first moved to cut off Chinese access to the fastest AI chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

The restrictions have intensified of late, and earlier this week, chip software makers, including Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems, said they had received letters from the U.S. Commerce Department telling them to stop selling to China.

Nvidia, which makes the most advanced semiconductors for AI applications, has vocally opposed the U.S. export controls, saying that they would merely force China to develop its own chip ecosystem instead of building around U.S. standards.

Nvidia was told earlier this year that it could no longer sell its H20 chip to China, a restriction that the company said this week would cause it to miss out on about $8 billion in sales in the current quarter. The H20 chip was specifically designed by Nvidia to comply with 2022 restrictions, but the Trump administration said in April that the company needed an export license. Nvidia said it was left with $4.5 billion in inventory it couldn’t reuse.

“The U.S. has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on the company’s earnings call. “That assumption was always questionable, and now it’s clearly wrong.”

The Trump administration did rescind an expansive chip export control rule that was implemented by the Biden administration called the “AI diffusion rule,” which would have placed export caps on most countries. A new and simpler rule is expected in the coming months.

WATCH: AI trade remains work in progress

Zscaler shares jumped 8% Friday after reporting stronger-than-expected results in the third fiscal quarter driven by artificial intelligence and widespread adoption of its zero-trust security platform.

“The proliferation of AI in all aspects of business is increasing the need for our AI security,” said CEO Jay Chaudhry in a release. “We empower customers to securely adopt both public GenAI apps and their own private AI apps, and we are increasing our investments in this area.”

The cloud security software company said revenues grew 23% to $678 million from about $553 million in the year-ago period. That topped the LSEG estimate of $666 million.

Zscaler reported adjusted earnings of 84 cents per share, topping the adjusted EPS of 75 cents per share expected by LSEG. Billings rose 25% to about $785 million, ahead of a $760 million estimate from StreetAccount.

Zscaler’s earnings come as a hopeful sign for a cybersecurity industry that has shown some pockets of weakness in a volatile macroeconomic environment. SentinelOne dropped after lowering its outlook, while Palo Alto Networks shares declined after missing on gross margin.

The report “echoes the strength we noted in our preview, and begins to prove out the reacceleration story that the company has been pointing to over the past few quarters,” wrote Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss.

Zscaler reported a net loss of $4.1 million, or a loss of 3 cents per share, for the quarter. Last year, net income came in at $19.1 million, or 12 cents per share.

The company issued upbeat adjusted EPS guidance for the fiscal fourth quarter. Zscaler expects adjusted earnings to range between 79 cents and 80 cents a share, versus the 77 cents expected by LSEG.

Along with its earnings, Zscaler appointed Kevin Rubin as its chief financial officer.

WATCH: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry weighs in on China hacking the U.S. Treasury