Elon Musk sent Tesla shares soaring to their highest level since January after purchasing roughly $1 billion worth of the company’s stock, Bloomberg reported in mid-September. The price jump brought Tesla’s shares into positive territory for the year.
The purchase represented Musk’s first acquisition of Tesla stock since February 2020, according to Bloomberg. In 2022, Musk, the Tesla CEO, sold roughly $20 billion worth of shares to help fund his acquisition of Twitter, the name of which he later changed to X.
The 10-figure purchase came as Tesla investors consider whether or not to approve a mammoth new pay package that could end up totalling over $1 trillion. Put forth by Tesla’s board of directors, which has faced criticism for its fealty to Musk, the pay package will come up for an investor vote in November.
The proposed 10-year, $1 trillion compensation package has faced criticism from many quarters, including even Pope Leo.
While skeptics have called Musk’s massive stock purchase a ploy to buoy share prices amid a difficult year for the company and to curry favor with Tesla investors in the lead-up to the vote on his pay package, some analysts viewed it as a vote — or bet — of confidence in the company’s future, particularly its ability to bring the long-promised Tesla Optimus robots to market in large numbers.
“If you are a little more skeptical on Tesla’s robotics endeavors, this is simply Elon buying shares to indicate his commitment to the company so that the recently proposed pay package gets approval,” said Dmitry Shlyapnikov, an analyst at Horizon Investments, according to Bloomberg.
Musk increasingly has tied Tesla’s future not to the electric vehicles for which the company is most well known but to endeavors such as autonomous-vehicle technology, AI, and robotics.
Meanwhile, Tesla saw its sales slump by 13% worldwide in the first half of 2025, according to Bloomberg.
The decline in sales, coupled with the rise of EV competitors like Hyundai and General Motors in the U.S., has caused Tesla’s once-dominant EV market share in the country to fall significantly, per Cox Automotive.
The week prior to Musk’s purchase, he temporarily lost his status as the world’s richest person to Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. As Tesla’s stock had floundered prior to Musk’s $1 billion infusion, Ellison’s wealth jumped by $90 billion in a single day after Oracle issued a highly favorable earnings report.
With Tesla’s competitors in the EV marketplace now offering everything from sporty coupes to work-oriented pickup trucks, those looking for Tesla alternatives have more options than ever.
