Tesla shares plunged 14.1 percent Thursday, the steepest intraday drop since June 5, 2025, slicing $18.6 billion from Elon Musk's net worth in a single session and leaving it at $731.7 billion. He remains the world's richest person by a comfortable margin, Larry Page sits at $263.8 billion, Jeff Bezos at $245.4 billion, but the move was a sharp reminder that the market's patience for the robotaxi-and-robotics narrative has an expiration date.
The catalyst was Wednesday's earnings report. Revenue came in at $28.2 billion, ahead of the $27.2 billion consensus, but earnings per share landed at 33 cents against a 55-cent estimate. Chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja reiterated a $25 billion capital-expenditure plan for this year and signaled more to come, a number that Morgan Stanley called a "necessary investment" while demanding "tangible" milestones for the robotaxi and Optimus programs. Canaccord Genuity echoed the sentiment, writing that it wants to see meaningful robotaxi deployments within six months as Tesla ramps its AI strategy.
Analysts also pressed for clarity on a Tesla-SpaceX merger, a topic Canaccord said it hoped would gain momentum. Musk deflected on the earnings call: "We can't talk about, you know, combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call, it has got to be done with the appropriate process." He did acknowledge "more and more overlap," pointing to Starlink integration in Cybertrucks and TeraFab, a proposed AI chip venture linking Tesla, SpaceX and the former xAI, which is now a SpaceX subsidiary.
SpaceX itself provided a side show. The company launched its 13th Starship test flight Thursday, the first since its initial public offering last month. An earlier attempt was aborted after engines failed to start, a hiccup that pushed SpaceX shares down more than 4 percent and shaved over $45 billion from Musk's fortune. On Thursday the stock was essentially flat, down 0.1 percent, leaving the Tesla rout as the sole driver of the wealth decline.
The broader arc is striking. Musk's fortune has fallen more than $700 billion from its post-IPO peak of $1.45 trillion, a level that briefly made him a trillionaire. The current $731.7 billion figure now sits below where it stood before SpaceX went public. Shareholders submitted questions ahead of the earnings call asking why the robotaxi business had "stalled" and what was keeping Tesla from its own short-term goals, a sign the street is no longer grading on a curve.
What comes next is a test of credibility. Tesla has the capital, the compute and the data advantage. What it lacks, at least in the eyes of Morgan Stanley and Canaccord, is a timeline the market can mark to market. The next six months will tell whether the spending translates into deployed robotaxis or simply more capex guidance.