U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Brownsville, Texas, on Nov. 19, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Via Reuters
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.
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.