Musk’s China Visit Cheers Tesla Investors, Wrongly

Maybe Elon Musk should visit China more often. Today’s 15% rally in Tesla stock follows his quick visit there on Sunday (which incidentally also confirmed his statement last week that his seven-day-a-week work schedule means he rarely takes even Sunday afternoons off). The big news that came out of the visit, according to Bloomberg, was that Tesla got tentative approval from the government to deploy its driver assistance tech in its cars in China, thanks in part to striking a mapping deal with China’s Baidu. That seems important. Musk has made autonomous driving central to his hopes of reviving Tesla’s growth. And this driver assistance tech—which Tesla calls Full Self Driving—is a step toward autonomous driving.

But investors may be overreacting. It’s not clear what approval Tesla actually got from Chinese authorities, as this analyst pointed out on Musk’s X. Indeed, the Teslarati blog quoted Tesla China as saying that “there is currently no timetable for FSD to enter China.” It’s times like this when Tesla shareholders suffer from Tesla’s lack of a formal communications function: The company relies on Musk’s tweets, which right now aren’t helpful. The market remains uninformed about the state of play for Tesla and China right now.