Tesla shares jumped to an all-time high on Wednesday, surpassing their prior record reached in 2021, sparked by a post-election rally and Wall Street’s increased enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company.

The stock rose to an intraday high of $415, which is 50 cents above its previous peak, and was on pace to close ahead of its highest finish, which was $409.97 on Nov. 4, 2021.

Tesla’s market value has swelled by about 66% this year, with almost all of those gains coming since Donald Trump’s election victory early last month. The stock’s 38% rally in November marked its best monthly performance since January of 2023 and its 10th best on record.

Musk poured $277 million into a pro-Trump campaign effort, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and turned his support for the Republican nominee into another full-time job ahead of the election, funding a swing-state operation to register voters and using his social media platform X to constantly tout his preferred candidate, frequently with misinformation.

The world’s richest person, who’s seen his net worth swell to over $360 billion, is set to lead the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” alongside onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

His new role could give Musk power over federal agencies’ budgets, staffing and the ability to push for the elimination of inconvenient regulations. Musk said during a Tesla earnings call in October that he intended to use his sway with Trump to establish a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.” Currently, approvals happen at the state level.

“The stock is responding to the Trump bump,” Craig Irwin, an analyst at Roth MKM, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week. Irwin had just increased his price target to $380 from $85, writing in a report that “Musk’s authentic support for Trump likely doubled Tesla’s pool of enthusiasts and lifted credibility for a demand inflection.”

On Wednesday, analysts at Goldman Sachs boosted their price target on Tesla, joining a parade of firms that have lifted their price expectation or their rating on the stock. The Goldman analysts wrote that “the market is taking a more forward-looking approach to Tesla, including with respect to its AI opportunity.”

Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America have also issued bullish reports of late.

Since Trump’s victory, Musk has been accompanying the president-elect in meetings with world leaders, and began advising him and members of Congress as to which federal agencies, regulations and budget items the billionaire would like to eliminate or greatly reduce.

Tesla’s surge to a record marks a dramatic turn from its performance to start the year. The company’s shares plunged 29% in the first three months of 2024, the worst quarter for the stock since the end of 2022 and the third worst since Tesla went public in 2010. At the time, investors were concerned about Tesla’s core business, which reported declining revenue in the first quarter in part due to increased competition from China.

In its third-quarter earnings report in October, Tesla reported a year-over-year revenue increase of 8%, which fell just shy of estimates. However, the company reported better-than-expected profit, and Musk said on the earnings call that his “best guess” is that “vehicle growth” will reach 20% to 30% next year, due to “lower cost vehicles” and the “advent of autonomy.” That forecast was ahead of analysts’ predictions.

WATCH: Tesla’s FSD tests were ‘incredibly good’

The crypto market jumped Wednesday, following two days of digestion after bitcoin rallied to $100,000 for the first time ever last week.

The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by 4.8% at $101,052.72, according to Coin Metrics. Ether also rose 4% but has not reclaimed its key resistance at $4,000. The CoinDesk 20 index, which measures broader cryptocurrency performance, climbed more than 7%.

Crypto stocks Coinbase and MicroStrategy advanced 5% and 7%, respectively.

All but MicroStrategy are still in the red for the week.

Cryptocurrencies got an extra boost after the November consumer price index came in as expected, with a 0.3% rise from October and 2.7% increase from a year ago. Investors are betting that reading clears the way for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates again at its December meeting next week.

Investors expect to see a continued chop for bitcoin around the $100,000 level but remain optimistic that its price could about double in the year ahead. Bernstein is forecasting a cycle high of $200,000 in 2025. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee said bitcoin has “upside to $250,000” next year, in his 2025 outlook published Wednesday.

Bitcoin’s current record is $103,844.05.

Google released the first version of its Gemini 2.0 family of artificial intelligence models on Wednesday.

Gemini 2.0 Flash, as the model is called, is available in a chat version for users globally while an experimental multimodal version of the model, with text-to-speech and image generation features, is available to developers. 

“If Gemini 1.0 was about organizing and understanding information, Gemini 2.0 is about making it much more useful,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.

Google’s latest large language model outperforms its predecessors in the majority of user request areas, such as code generation and the ability to provide factually correct responses from user requests. One area where it is inferior to Gemini 1.5 Pro is when it comes to evaluating longer contexts. 

To access the chat-optimized version of the experimental Flash 2.0, Gemini users can select it in the model drop-down menu on desktop and mobile web. It will be available on the Gemini mobile app soon, the company said.

The multimodal version of Gemini Flash 2.0 will be available via the Google’s AI Studio and Vertex AI developer platforms.

General availability of Gemini 2.0 Flash’s multimodal version will come in January, along with more Gemini 2.0 model sizes, Google said Wednesday. The company said it also plans to expand Gemini 2.0 to more Google products in early 2025. 

Gemini 2.0 represents Google’s latest efforts in the tech industry’s increasingly competitive AI race. Google is competing against the likes of rivals like tech giants Microsoft and Meta and startups like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Anthropic, which makes Claude. 

Along with the release of the new Flash model are other research prototypes aimed at developing more “agentic” AI models and experiences. Agentic models, according to the company, “can understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision.”

Last week, in a conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Pichai challenged Microsoft’s AI advancement, saying he’d “love to do a side-by-side comparison” of the two companies’ models “any day, any time.”