Tesla stock is trading below its S&P 500 inclusion price as investors worry about Elon Musk's Twitter deal and eye a bearish death cross
- Tesla stock fell by 6% on Tuesday, to well below its S&P 500 inclusion price of $695.
- The stock has come under pressure amid a tech sell-off and investor wariness of Musk's Twitter deal.
Tesla stock fell by 6% on Tuesday, to $627.65, solidifying its decline below the price when S&P Dow Jones Indices added it to its popular S&P 500 index.
Tesla was added to the S&P 500 on December 21, 2020, after the company reported more than four consecutive quarters of profits. Tesla stock was trading at about $695 a share when it was added to the index.
The decline in Tesla comes amid a broader sell-off in tech stocks, with the Nasdaq 100 index officially in bear-market territory, down 29% year-to-date. Tesla stock is down 39% year-to-date, and it's down about 50% from its record high.
The decline has likely been exacerbated by CEO Elon Musk's $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. That has turned into what Wedbush's Dan Ives called a "circus," as Musk is trying to put the deal on hold, citing the number of fake accounts on the platform.
But Musk signed a contract with Twitter, agreed to a $1 billion breakup fee, and waived his right to perform due diligence, as outlined in Twitter's Securities and Exchange Commission filing about the deal. Ives said all this drama is wearing on Tesla investors.
"This circus show has been a major overhang on Tesla's stock and has been a black eye for Musk so far how he has handled this spiraling situation in our opinion," Ives said in a note on Monday. "We believe with the Twitter shareholder meeting on the horizon and approval for the deal expected, Musk is facing a fork in the road situation in which he has to decide his next step in this soap opera as Tesla investor patience is wearing very thin."
Also not helping Tesla's stock is an imminent death cross, a bearish sell signal in technical analysis that alerts traders to a solidifying downtrend in the stock price. The death cross occurs when the 50-day moving average falls below the 200-day moving average, which is on track to happen before the end of this week.
The lagging indicator means Tesla stock is likely to continue to decline, which could feed into further weakness, as Musk has pledged millions of Tesla shares as collateral to purchase Twitter.
"If the Twitter deal were to close today and subsequently Tesla's stock price dropped to $350-400, Musk could be forced to sell ~13M Tesla shares," the Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said in a note on Tuesday. That potential margin call is just one more reason some Tesla investors are likely concerned about Musk's deal to buy Twitter.
