Matt Levine, Columnist

Elon Musk Bought Some Stock

Also ChatGPT stock picks, six-month reporting, structured notes, Capital/Strategy, AI Ph.D. pay and AlphaQuest.

September 15, 2025 at 5:55 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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On Friday, Elon Musk spent about $1 billion to buy 2.57 million shares of stock in Tesla Inc., bringing his ownership of Tesla from 19.71% to 19.78%.1 The purchases were disclosed today, and the stock went up: The stock closed at $395.94 per share on Friday, and at noon today it was trading at about $419.54. Why did the stock go up? Bloomberg’s Craig Trudell and Benjamin Stupples write:

Sounds about right. Tesla’s shareholders like Musk; they think the company is worth more when it has his full(ish) attention and interest, and it’s worth less when he’s off doing other things. Tesla recently proposed giving Musk a $1 trillion pay package to keep him motivated over the next decade, and I suppose him buying $1 billion of stock with his own money sends a similar message. The message is “Tesla is still my favorite child,” or one of them anyway. So the stock went up about 6%.