Tesla (TSLA) is no stranger to headlines, and for much of its history, those headlines have been pretty favorable. But not this year. The Elon Musk-led electric vehicle company has seen its stock price (and reputation) falter due to a combination of political and business forces.
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So what is contributing to the drop in the stock, and how much would a short of this stock at the beginning of 2025 be worth now?
Also see what experts advise for Tesla investors amid the stock slide.
Musk himself has become the center of controversy due to his position as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a nonofficial organization created by President Donald Trump to drastically downsize the federal government. The backlash against Musk ranges from investors dumping Tesla stock to vandals attacking its dealerships.
Worries have also surfaced concerning Tesla’s profitability and the potential impact of Trump-led auto tariffs on its business.
These dynamics have not gone unnoticed on Wall Street. Telsa’s stock closed at $272.06 a share on March 26, 2025, down from $403.84 on Dec. 31, 2024. That represents a loss of $131.78 a share since the beginning of the year, or roughly 33%.
“At this point I think all of the positive expectations have been baked into the market,” said Anthony Grosso, a New York-based financial strategist and mortgage loan originator. “It will be very difficult for the news to continue to match the current valuations and any negative information will only push it back down. I expect TSLA to have continued wild volatility.”
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For investors, this is bad news — unless you chose to short the stock. The exact amount of money you would have made by shorting Tesla’s stock depends on how many shares you shorted and when the order was filled.
In case you need a primer on shorting a stock, it basically means looking to profit by betting that shares of a stock will go down rather than up. You can usually do this through a broker that lets you borrow shares at a certain price, sell them on the open market, buy them back at a lower price and then return the borrowed shares to the original lender.
So how much would you have made shorting Tesla’s stock at the beginning of the year?
Assume you entered a market short-sell order for 100 shares of Tesla at the beginning of the year when the stock traded at $403.84. You filled an order for 100 shares at that price. If you bought back shares when the stock fell to $272.06, you would realize a short-sale profit of $13,178 — the total of the $131.78 per-share gain times 100 shares.
Keep in mind that you may have had to pay commissions, interest and other fees that would’ve reduced your profit.
As for the current short-sale opportunity, Tesla shares recently got a boost when Trump recently accepted a delivery of Tesla cars to the White House. Despite that endorsement, some stock market experts remain wary of the stock.
“Even though it rallied hard … the broader trend is still pointing downward — mildly bearish over the six-month stretch,” said Edward Corona, a Florida-based trader and publisher of The Options Oracle Newsletter. “It’s been stair-stepping lower for weeks, and while the recent uptick looks impressive on the surface, it hasn’t reversed the longer-term damage.”
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: If You Shorted Tesla Stock at the Start of 2025, Here’s How Much You Would’ve Made