Elon says he's done with politics, investors respond fast

Tesla’s stock climbed nearly 6% on Tuesday after Elon Musk told users on his platform, X, that he’s dropping politics and locking in on his companies — Tesla, xAI, and X.

He made that announcement over the weekend, just before his SpaceX Starship rocket launch. According to a report from the Washington Post, Elon is stepping away from his role in Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to focus fully on business.

That sudden change in priority came after yet another outage hit X, previously known as Twitter. The outage over the weekend left thousands of users locked out. Earlier that same week, the platform had suffered a data center failure.

Since Elon bought the company in 2022, X has seen frequent breakdowns. He addressed it directly on X, writing, “As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” adding that the “failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.” 

He also declared that he’s going back to “spending 24/7 at work.” That post landed hours before SpaceX was due to attempt the launch of Flight 9, following two failures earlier this year — in January and March — where the Starship rockets exploded.

Elon says he’s done with politics, investors respond fast

The rally in Tesla shares comes after a wider pattern of Elon scaling down his involvement in political activities. During Tesla’s April earnings call, he said he would “significantly reduce” his time working for Trump’s government department.

In the 2024 election cycle, Elon had thrown billions of dollars into Trump’s re-election campaign and into various conservative political projects. But when someone on X posted about DOGE and his government reform efforts, Elon simply responded: “did my best.”

In a separate interview at the Qatar Economic Forum, he said he plans to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations moving forward. 

Those comments, combined with the operational chaos at X and pressure mounting ahead of the next rocket launch, made it clear to investors that Elon had no room for distractions.

Despite the stock rally, Tesla is still dealing with blowback from Elon’s political entanglements. Protesters have appeared outside Tesla showrooms, and the brand continues to take hits globally.

In April, Tesla sold 7,261 vehicles in Europe, which was a steep 49% drop from the same time last year. The data came from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

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