NEW YORK, January 1, 2026, 7:33 PM ET — Market closed.
- Tesla last closed down 1.1% at $449.72 in the final session of 2025.
- A filing showed CEO Elon Musk gifted 210,699 Tesla shares to charities as part of year-end tax planning.
- Investors are watching for Tesla’s fourth-quarter delivery report expected Friday.
Tesla shares finished the last trading session of 2025 lower after a regulatory filing showed Chief Executive Elon Musk gifted 210,699 shares to charities at the end of December. The stock last closed down 1.1% at $449.72.
The disclosure matters now because Tesla enters 2026 with investor focus turning back to near-term demand signals, starting with its quarterly vehicle deliveries update expected Friday.
Those numbers are being watched closely as the electric-vehicle market gets more crowded and price competition remains intense, especially in China.
Wall Street’s regular session is shut on New Year’s Day and resumes normal hours on Friday, Jan. 2, according to the New York Stock Exchange holiday calendar.
In the Form 4 filing, Musk said the transfer was tied to “year-end tax planning” and that the recipient charities had indicated they had “no current intention to sell” the stock. The transaction date was Dec. 30. SEC
At Wednesday’s close, the gifted stake would be worth roughly $95 million, based on Reuters calculations from the closing price, though Tesla’s shares have been volatile into year-end.
Investors are also weighing Tesla’s sales trajectory against the pace set by Chinese rival BYD, which said 2025 electric-vehicle sales exceeded Tesla’s estimated total as it pushed overseas to offset tougher conditions at home.
Tesla is expected to report about 440,900 deliveries in the fourth quarter, down 11% from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg-compiled data cited by The Straits Times. The company has also published its own average of analyst estimates that implies a steeper decline, the report said.
“Tesla investors are focused on how the company might look five, 10, 15 years down the road,” Garrett Nelson, an equity analyst at CFRA Research, told The Straits Times, adding that the question is whether that patience holds as headwinds show up in the financials. The Straits Times
One demand headwind in the U.S. is the lapse of the federal clean-vehicle tax credit after Sept. 30, 2025, under IRS rules, removing a subsidy that had helped pull forward purchases earlier in the year.
Beyond deliveries, traders will be watching for signs Tesla can defend margins through pricing and mix, and whether enthusiasm around autonomy and robotics continues to outweigh weaker unit growth.
Before next session, the biggest known catalyst is the deliveries release, with investors looking for any gap versus expectations and for regional demand signals that could shape early-2026 sentiment.
Tesla has not yet posted an earnings date for its fourth-quarter results on its investor relations calendar, which showed its prior fourth-quarter results were released late January last year.
Macro catalysts that can move growth stocks are also stacking up in January, including the U.S. employment report on Jan. 9 and the December CPI report on Jan. 13, followed by the Federal Reserve’s Jan. 27-28 policy meeting.
Technically, traders are watching whether Tesla holds the $450 area after the year-end slide; a rebound would put the recent $458–$460 zone back in view as near-term resistance.
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