NEW YORK — Tesla shares put together one of their better days in weeks, climbing about 3.4% in Monday's session (Aug. 3) to close near $313, up from roughly $303 at the prior close. Early in Tuesday's trading the stock held near $311 as investors turned their attention to a busy week for the wider Musk universe.
The Move
The gain for Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) snapped a stretch of pressure that had followed the company's second-quarter report, and it came on optimism about the parts of the business that investors increasingly value most: autonomy and artificial intelligence. Momentum in $TSLA has been closely tied lately to progress on the robotaxi program, a theme we unpacked in our previous daily explainer on why Tesla stock firmed into SpaceX earnings week.
The Why
Two threads drove Monday's advance. First, confidence in Tesla's self-driving stack continues to build. The company's robotaxi fleet has logged hundreds of thousands of fully unsupervised miles with a clean safety record, and enthusiasts keep stacking up long intervention-free drives — including one owner's cross-country streak we detailed in our report on a 20,000-mile Full Self-Driving run. Investors read those milestones as evidence that Tesla's robotaxi network can scale.
Second, traders were positioning ahead of a pivotal day for the broader Muskonomy. SpaceX ($SPCX) was set to report its first-ever quarterly results as a public company on Tuesday, and speculation about a potential Tesla-SpaceX combination has kept sentiment around both names intertwined. With SpaceX shares hovering near $110 after a rocky post-IPO stretch, any read-through to Tesla's AI and space ambitions tends to move $TSLA as well.
