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Tesla CEO Elon Musk smiles as he addresses guests at the Offshore Northern Seas 2022 (ONS) meeting in Stavanger, Norway on August 29, 2022.

Carina Johansen | AFP | Getty Images

Tesla shares surged 33% this week, marking their best weekly performance since May 2013 and second best on record.

The stock rose 11% on Friday to close at $177.88. The rebound followed a six-month period in which Tesla shares had declined more than 40%. The stock’s 65% plunge in 2022 was its worst in Tesla’s 12-plus years as a public company.

Tesla’s rally this week was aided by an upbeat fourth-quarter earnings report. During the call with shareholders and analysts, CEO Elon Musk said the company was on target to potentially produce 2 million vehicles in 2023, and he suggested demand would support sales of those cars as well.

Official guidance called for production of 1.8 million vehicles this year. The company has not revised its longstanding target for 50% compound annual growth rate over a multi-year horizon.

Tesla’s five day performance charted against Rivian and Ford Motor Company.

Tesla beat on both the top and the bottom lines, recording total revenue of $24.32 billion, including $324 million of deferred revenue related to Tesla’s driver assistance systems. The company cut prices for its cars dramatically in December and January, leading to concern about demand and a buildup of inventory.

Analyst reaction to Tesla’s numbers was mixed.

“For bulls, the growth story is alive and well,” Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi, who has an underperform rating on the stock, wrote in a note on Thursday. “For bears, the numbers don’t lie.”

In early January, Tesla reported fourth-quarter vehicle deliveries and production that fell shy of expectations.

Tesla’s stock jump came amid a broader market rally. The S&P 500 was up 2.2% for the week and the Nasdaq gained 4.3%.

Other U.S.-based electric vehicle makers saw their shares climb higher. Rivian rose 22% during the week, while shares in legacy automakers Ford and General Motors each gained more than 7%.

Rival electric car manufacturer Lucid spiked on Friday as well, rising 43% on reports of rumors that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, intended to take the company private.

Some of Tesla’s underperformance last year was attributed to Musk’s shift of focus to Twitter, which he acquired for $44 billion in October. Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has experienced mass layoffs and fleeing advertisers, gutting morale.

Tesla remains the second most-shorted stock in U.S. markets, behind only Apple, meaning that a large numbers of investors are betting on a decline. Over 94 million of the automaker’s shares are shorted, according to data from S3 Partners.

Despite the rally, active short selling continues, S3 managing director Ihor Dusaniwsky told CNBC. Short sellers view Tesla’s appreciation as having created “an overheated and overbought stock that is due for at least a short-term reversal,” he said. In the last week, S3 Partners said it’s seen a 3.9% increase in total shares shorted, while investors shorting the stock lost $4.3 billion over that stretch.

WATCH: Tesla still in league of its own

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe over faulty crash reporting

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe over faulty crash reporting

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Elon Musk‘s Tesla is facing a federal probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after the U.S. auto safety agency found that the company was not reporting crashes as required.

According to documents posted to NHTSA’s website on Thursday, the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation had “identified numerous incident reports” from Tesla concerning crashes that had “occurred several months or more before the dates of the reports” to the agency.

The delayed reports were likely “due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been fixed,” according to NHTSA’s explanation for the probe.

Automakers must report on collisions that occurred on publicly accessible roads in the U.S. that involved the use of either partially or fully automated driving systems in their cars within five days of the companies becoming aware of any crash.

The agency will now conduct an “audit query” to figure out if Tesla is in compliance with its reporting requirements, and to “evaluate the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them.”

NHTSA will also investigate whether Tesla neglected to report any prior relevant collisions, and whether its reports submitted to the safety regulator “include all of the required and available data.”

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Tesla stock was little changed Thursday.

The company sells electric vehicles equipped with a standard Autopilot system, or premium Full Self-Driving Supervised option, which is also known as FSD, in the U.S. Both require a driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time.

A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions drawing on news reports, police records and federal data, TeslaDeaths.com, has found at least 59 fatalities resulting from crashes where Tesla Autopilot or FSD were a factor.

The new NHTSA probe comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that the company can become a global leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.

A manned Tesla Robotaxi service launched in Austin, Texas in June, and the company is running another manned car service in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Riders can book trips via the company’s Tesla Robotaxi app.

Tesla has not begun driverless ride-hailing operations that would make it directly comparable to Alphabet-owned Waymo, or Baidu’s Apollo Go and other autonomous vehicle competitors yet.

The company is facing a sales and profit decline, due, in part, to a consumer backlash against Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, his work to re-elect President Donald Trump, and his work leading the Department of Government Efficiency to slash federal spending and its workforce.

Still, many Wall Street analysts and shareholders remain optimistic about Musk’s vision.

“We think it is a positive that Tesla has begun robotaxi operations which puts it on the path to addressing a large market (we estimate that the US robotaxi market will be $7 bn in 2030 as discussed in our recent AV deep dive report),” Goldman Sachs autos industry analysts wrote in a note Wednesday.

Musk and Tesla have not given investors a sense of what they expect in terms of Robotaxi-related revenue or the technical performance of vehicles in its rideshare fleet, so a “debate on the pace of robotaxi growth will continue,” the research note said.

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Apple TV+ hikes subscription for third time in three years

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Apple TV+ hikes subscription for third time in three years

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Apple is taking a cue from some of its competitors.

The technology giant’s Apple TV+ monthly subscription is now $12.99, starting Thursday in the U.S. and other countries.

Apple said the new price will hit current subscribers 30 days after their next renewal date. The annual subscription price will not change.

For new subscribers, the $12.99 monthly price begins after a seven-day trial period.

The change marks Apple’s first price hike for its streaming service since 2023. At the time, Apple lifted its monthly price to about $9.99 from $6.99. The company raised the price in 2022 from $4.99.

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Apple TV+ is one of the company’s most popular services, but Apple does not release viewership numbers. A report from The Information earlier this year said the streaming service is losing more than $1 billion annually as subscriptions rocketed toward 45 million, citing people familiar with the matter.

Apple isn’t the only streaming company hiking prices this year to either fund new content or reap returns on their investments. Earlier this year, both Netflix and NBCUniversal’s Peacock boosted prices. Music streaming platform Spotify also raised prices in multiple markets.

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its streaming service to Android phones in a move that could open the company to more people worldwide.

The company is fresh off the release of its highest-grossing theatrical film, “F1: The Movie.”

Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

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Trump’s Nvidia and Intel meddling is a ‘scattershot method of crony capitalism’: Walter Isaacson

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Trump's Nvidia and Intel meddling is a 'scattershot method of crony capitalism': Walter Isaacson

U.S. government's push for Intel stake is a scattershot method of crony capitalism: Walter Isaacson

President Donald Trump‘s dealings with Intel and Nvidia amount to a “scattershot method of crony capitalism,” Walter Isaacson said Thursday.

“That state capitalism often evolves into crony capitalism, where you have favored companies and industries that pay tribute to the leader, and that is a recipe for not only disaster, but just sort of a corrupt sense of messiness,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The Tulane University professor, widely known for his recent Elon Musk biography, argued that this method won’t succeed in reviving American manufacturing.

Isaacson’s comments come as the Trump administration wades further into influencing the way companies operate in the U.S.

The White House is pushing for a stake in embattled chipmaker Intel after Trump called CEO Lip-Bu Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and said he should resign.

Earlier this month, both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreed to pay 15% of their China revenues to the U.S. government for export licenses to sell certain chips there.

Isaacson said he’s always been “dubious” of public-private partnerships. He highlighted Trump’s push for Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in its namesake soda as another example of “crony capitalism.”

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