U.S. President Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview aired on Sunday that he has a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy TikTok, whose identities he can reveal in about two weeks.

Trump added that the deal will probably need Beijing’s approval to move forward, but said “I think President Xi will probably do it,” in reference to China’s leader Xi Jinping.

The president made the off-the-cuff remarks while discussing the possibility of another pause of his “reciprocal” tariffs on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.” 

Tiktok’s fate in the U.S. has been in doubt since the approval of a law in 2024 that sought to ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it. The legislation was driven by concerns that the Chinese government could manipulate content and access sensitive data from American users.

Earlier this month, Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest from the platform’s U.S. business. It was his third extension since the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok law just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration in January. The new deadline is Sept. 17. 

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, of PAFACA, had originally been set to take effect on Jan. 19, after which app store operators and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.

TikTok went dark in the U.S. ahead of the original deadline, but was restored after Trump provided it with assurances on the extension.

Trump, who credited the app with boosting his support among young voters in the last presidential election, has maintained that he would like to see the platform stay afloat under new ownership. 

Potential buyers that have voiced interest in the app include Trump insiders such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison to firms like AppLovin and Perplexity AI. 

However, it’s unclear if ByteDance would be willing to sell the company. Any potential divestiture is likely to require approval from the Chinese government.

A deal that would have spun off TikTok’s U.S. operations and allowed ByteDance to retain a minority position had been in the works in April, but was derailed by the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China, Reuters reported that month.

The president previously floated a proposal for American stakeholders to buy the company and then sell a 50% stake to the U.S. government as part of a joint venture. 

Experts have previously told CNBC that any potential deal could face legal challenges in the U.S., depending on whether it complies with PAFACA.

Insiders at artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia have dumped more than $1 billion in stock over the last year, according to a report from the Financial Times.

About $500 million worth of sales occurred over the last month as the market notched new highs and shook off geopolitical tensions that had rattled investors, according to the report. The stock is up more than 17% this year despite concerns over curbs limiting AI chip sales overseas and 44% over the last three months.

Securities filings revealed that the tech titan recently unloaded about $15 million worth of shares as part of his more than $900 million plan announced in March to sell up to 6 million shares through the end of the year. Huang’s net worth totals about $138 billion, placing him as 11th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Last week, the chipmaking giant hit a fresh record and rallied for five straight days following the stock sales and an annual shareholder meeting, where the CEO called robotics the biggest opportunity for the company after AI. That helped the chipmaker regain its seat as the most valuable company ahead Microsoft and Apple.

The FT article cited a report from VerityData, which noted that the jump in shares above $150 prompted the stock dump.

Last year, Huang unloaded more than $700 million in Nvidia shares as part of a prearranged plan.

A Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Read the complete Financial Times report here.

At the time of Tesla’s IPO 15 years ago, the company had generated roughly $150 million in revenue in its lifetime. That came almost entirely from the Roadster, a two-seat electric sportscar that boasted a range of 236 miles on a single charge.

The Model S sedan was still in the lab, two years away from hitting the market.

“The Model S, which is planned to compete in the premium vehicle market, is intended to have a significantly broader customer base than the Tesla Roadster,” the company said in its IPO filing, ahead of its planned $226 million offering.

A bet on Tesla, which debuted on the Nasdaq on June 29, 2010, was a wager on CEO Elon Musk’s ability to develop a roster of mass-market electric cars and scale an automaker far away from the Detroit auto hub, focusing instead on Silicon Valley, home to much of the world’s top tech talent.

Musk didn’t start Tesla, but he invested early, served as chairman and took over as CEO in October 2008, after leading a board revolt against founding CEO and inventor Martin Eberhard early that year.

An investor who put $10,000 into Tesla’s stock at the time of the company’s IPO and held onto all those shares would now own a stake worth close to $3 million. A similar investment at the time in the S&P 500 would have resulted in holdings worth about $57,000.

Far removed from its days as an experimental clean-tech startup led by a member of the “PayPal mafia,” Tesla is now the eighth most-valuable publicly traded U.S. company, with a market cap of over $1 trillion after nearly hitting $100 billion in revenue last year.

The Roadster is largely in the history books, and the Model S is no longer of great importance to the company’s bottom line. Rather, it’s Tesla’s top-selling Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedan, along with sales of environmental regulatory credits, that helped define the company’s financial success over the past decade.

But for the 54-year-old Musk (his birthday was Saturday), now the world’s wealthiest person, that’s the past. He’s told investors that the reason to buy and own Tesla stock from here has almost nothing to do with selling cars to consumers.

“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on an earnings call in April of last year. He added, “We will, and we are.”

Two months after that, Musk said his company’s Optimus humanoid robots that he hopes some day will perform like R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars, could some day lift Tesla’s market cap to $25 trillion.

Musk, who last year characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” has said he expects thousands of Optimus robots to be working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025, and that the company will begin selling the robot next year.

As for autonomy, Tesla currently lags behind Alphabet’s Waymo, which is operating public robotaxi services in several U.S. markets, and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China. Tesla’s Robotaxi just launched a very limited pilot service in Austin, Texas, earlier this month, and said Friday it had completed its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer.

While Tesla still has its share of fanatics and a largely bullish slate of analysts, Wall Street is skeptical of Musk’s futuristic promises or sees them as baked into the stock price. The stock is down about 20% this year, badly underperforming major U.S. indexes and trailing all of its megacap tech peers. Apple, down 19.7% for the year, is the only one close.

Earlier in June, Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, Milan Kovac, said he’s leaving the company after a nine-year tenure, and Musk more recently fired Omead Afshar, the automaker’s vice president of manufacturing and operations.

Meanwhile, Tesla EV sales have been sluggish in 2025, with automotive revenue suffering a second straight year-over-year decline in the first quarter due to an aging lineup and bustling competition, especially from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers.

New Tesla sales in Europe fell for a fifth straight month in May, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, or ACEA, and Tesla’s newest model, the Cybertruck, has failed to gain significant traction in the U.S. after a series of recalls.

Hovering over Tesla’s business is the unpredictability of Musk.

Long glorified for his business success — through PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, brain tech startup Neuralink and artificial intelligence company xAI, among other pursuits — Musk asserted himself in the political realm last year, when he endorsed Donald Trump for president and subsequently injected nearly $300 million into his campaign and related Republican causes.

Musk spent the first few months of 2025 spearheading President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), slashing the size of the federal government and stripping resources from regulatory agencies, including those tasked with oversight of his companies.

But his pivot to politics came at a cost, at least in the short term.

Musk’s vocal and financial support of Trump, endorsement of Germany’s far-right AfD party and extended string of charged and divisive remarks and gestures, including on his social network X and in press appearances, has been correlated with declines in Tesla’s reputation, and a drop in his overall favorability, according to polling data.

“Unless Tesla can come up with a whole range of new products that will really excite consumers, and unless they can mitigate some of the antagonism caused by their leader, they will be seen as past their peak and will begin to go down,” David Haigh, CEO of research and consulting firm Brand Finance, said in January.

Brand Finance’s data showed that the value of Tesla’s brand fell by 26% in 2024, a second straight annual decline. That was before Musk’s time working in the second Trump administration.

Musk’s official tenure in Washington, D.C., ended earlier in June, just as his relationship with the president was souring. Shares of Tesla fell 14% on June 5, as President Trump threatened to pull government contracts for Musk‘s companies, escalating a war of words over the president’s spending bill.

Musk temporarily slowed his posting about politics on social media after that, and appeared to focus more on promoting his businesses. But this weekend he resumed attacking portions of the bill that would hamper solar and renewable energy companies, including Tesla.

Whether Musk is now focused enough to solve Tesla’s problems and, even if he is, whether that’s a big catalyst for the company, is very much up in the air.

Musk and Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Tesla investors have learned that volatility is a big part of the story, and has been since the company’s stock market debut. On more than 40 occasions in the past 15 years, Tesla’s stock has gained or lost at least 20% in a single month.

Here are the three best and worst months for the stock and what happened to cause these hefty moves:

In Tesla’s best month on record, the stock jumped 81%. The company for the first time reported a quarterly profit, albeit a very narrow one. It didn’t mark a sudden turn to profitability, as Tesla continued to lose money until 2018. But sales of Model S cars topped estimates as did revenue from zero emission vehicle (ZEV) credits, which have long been a boon for the company and have sometimes been the difference between a quarter ending in the red or the black.

August 2020

Following a big dip in the early days of the Covid pandemic, Tesla’s stock began an historic rally, leading to an eightfold increase in the stock in 2020, by far its best year on record. Its single best month that year was August, when the share price jumped 74%. Model 3 sales were accelerating rapidly, but much of the momentum was tied to buzz that the company could soon enter the S&P 500, and a pandemic market boom, when retail investors poured into meme stocks, cryptocurrencies and FOMO (fear of missing out) assets. Tesla’s big announcement in August 2020 was a five-for-one stock split, with the share price having soared well past $1,000. Tesla would split its stock again in 2022.

November 2010

Tesla’s 62% rally in its fifth full month as a public company was as much a sign of early volatility as anything else. The next month, the company would lose almost a quarter of its value, wiping out most of those gains. Tesla’s cash position at the end of 2010 was precarious enough that the company warned it may need to raise more money in the future, particularly “if there are delays in the launch of the Model S.” On Nov. 9, 2010, Tesla reported a 31% drop in year-over-year revenue to $31.2 million and a net loss of $35 million. A week earlier, the company said Panasonic had invested $30 million in Tesla through a private placement.

Tesla’s steepest monthly slump on record was a 37% decline to wrap up 2022, which was the worst year for the Nasdaq since the 2008 financial crisis. The company faced a production halt at its Shanghai facility, which was dealing with a fresh onslaught of Covid cases. Musk had been selling Tesla stock in big chunks to fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which he later renamed X.

Musk said on Twitter Spaces on Dec. 22 that he wouldn’t be selling any stock for 18 to 24 months. In a debate with a Tesla shareholder, he pinned Tesla’s declining share price on Federal Reserve rate hikes, writing that “people will increasingly move their money out of stocks into cash, thus causing stocks to drop.” The distraction of the Twitter deal weighed on Tesla shares, and Musk also frustrated some shareholders by borrowing personnel from the Tesla Autopilot team to work on his social media company’s technology.

February 2025

What was supposed to be a honeymoon period for Tesla, thanks to Trump’s return to the White House, turned into a massive selloff, with the stock plummeting 28% in February. In its earnings report in late January, Tesla said automotive revenue sank 8% from a year earlier and the company reported a 23% drop in operating income. Tesla cited reduced average selling prices across its Model 3, Model Y, Model S and Model X lines as a major reason for the decline. Investors also worried about impending tariffs on goods and materials coming from Canada and Mexico, where some of its key suppliers are based. With Musk ramping up his political rhetoric, new vehicle registrations dropped in Europe, plummeting in Germany by around 60% in January from a year earlier.

January 2024

The beginning of 2024 was almost as bad for Tesla, with the stock tumbling 25% to open the year. The company reported revenue and profit for the fourth quarter that trailed estimates, partly because of steep price cuts around the world. Tesla warned that volume growth in 2024 “may be notably lower” than in 2023, and cautioned investors that it was “currently between two major growth waves.”

There were countless other monumental moments for Tesla along the way and, had Musk gotten his wish in 2018, the IPO anniversary may have never taken place.

“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk infamously tweeted in August of that year. Tesla’s stock trading was initially halted and shares were volatile for weeks. A take-private never occurred.

The SEC investigated and charged Musk with civil securities fraud as a result of the tweets. Tesla and Musk struck a revised settlement agreement in 2019 over those charges. The agreement forced Musk to temporarily relinquish his role as chairman of the Tesla board, a position that’s now held by Robyn Denholm.

WATCH: No bad news is great news for Tesla robotaxi debut