Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla’s Trillion-Dollar Market Value Is Fueled by Amnesia

The carmaker’s stock surge owes more to the vibes around tariff news than any fundamental change in its outlook.

May 12, 2025 at 4:24 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

The Washington vibes.
Photographer: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images North America

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Tesla Inc. is back in the trillion-dollar club for the first time since February. Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker added about $65 billion of market value on Monday morning, as of writing this, taking it into thirteen figures again.

The obvious catalyst is the partial truce in the US-China trade war, fueling a 2.5% rally in the S&P 500 Index. Tesla’s gain is more than double that, presumably reflecting the specific benefits it stands to reap from all this. These include… vibes?