Tesla's stock has seen its biggest jump since the spring of 2025. What are investors watching?
Shares of the electric vehicle manufacturer are now trading above Wall Street's target price
For the first time in over a year, Tesla has released a major Autopilot firmware update for electric vehicles equipped with the previous-generation computer / Photo: Tada Images / Shutterstock
Shares of electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla closed the first trading day of this week with their biggest gain since April 2025. Investors were buoyed by the long-awaited release of a new version of Autopilot for previously released vehicles. The surge in SpaceX’s stock price—in which Tesla holds a stake—also added to the optimism in the market.
Details
Tesla shares closed at $411.84 on June 29 in New York, up 8.5%. There hasn’t been such a sharp rise since April 25, 2025—when Elon Musk’s company saw its market capitalization increase by 9.8% after the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a reduction in regulatory barriers to the deployment of robotaxis, MarketWatch reports, citing Dow Jones exchange data.
Why did the prices skyrocket?
There were virtually no significant events that could explain this surge—Wall Street analysts did not revise their ratings on Tesla stock, according to Barron's. The publication believes that Musk himself contributed to the rise: he wrote that the company is rolling out a new version of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) autopilot to owners of cars equipped with AI3—the previous generation of onboard computers, which hadn’t received major FSD updates for over a year. The interest for investors lies in the fact that Tesla owners with AI3 now have an incentive to purchase an FSD subscription for $99 per month, Barron’s notes.
In addition, Tesla owns a small stake in SpaceX, and shares of Musk’s aerospace company rose 7.2% on June 29—partly due to speculation about its ability to compete with traditional telecommunications players, according to MarketWatch. Musk also stated that the new version of the Grok chatbot from xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, “may” outperform Anthropic’s products.
Monday marked the first trading day for SpaceX shares following their inclusion in the Russell 1000 Index. However, inclusion in this benchmark can be considered only a secondary driver: the amount of assets directly linked to the Russell is measured in billions of dollars, not trillions, as is the case with the S&P 500, Barron’s points out.
What Wall Street Thinks of Tesla
For the past three months, Wall Street’s consensus on Tesla shares has remained neutral (Hold, equivalent to a recommendation to neither buy nor sell the stock), according to FactSet data. At the same time, the service’s average target price of $401.75 per share is 2.5% below the current price.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
