In early trading of U.S. stocks on September 16, U.S. Eastern Time, Tesla's share price rose by more than 6% at one point due to Musk's rare large-scale open market increase, marking that its trend turned from decline to rise during the year.

What positive has Tesla's share price experienced since the beginning of the year?Doo Financial brings you a piece.

Model Y L sold well

Among all the benefits, the launch of Model Y L can be said to have the most substantial impact.Faced with the extremely fierce competition in the China market and the continuous launch of new models with high cost performance by local brands, Tesla launched the Model Y L with a longer wheelbase and six-seat layout, which is undoubtedly a highly localized strategy.This model fully matches the preferences of China home users for space and practicality, while the price setting that retains brand tonality has not deviated from the mainstream acceptance range.After achieving a balance between product configuration and price, this model quickly sold out, and the delivery cycle was even scheduled to November 2025.The enthusiastic response from the market not only consolidates Tesla's fundamentals of sales in China, but also provides relatively certain performance support for its next few earnings cycles.

Trillion-dollar incentives to put Maskra back into the "driving seat"

Just a few days after the launch of Model Y L delivery, on September 5, 2025, Tesla's board of directors proposed a market-shaking CEO salary incentive plan.The plan, with a potential value of up to $1 trillion, is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious executive reward mechanisms in U.S. corporate history.The plan binds Musk's returns to a series of challenging strategic goals, including the commercialization of autonomous taxis, mass production sales of the humanoid robot Optimus, and increasing the company's EBITDA to hundreds of billions of dollars. This time point is very critical because it not only strengthens the narrative structure of the previous "AI transformation" vision, but also explicitly includes the humanoid robot business into the core assessment indicators for the first time, allowing investors to re-recognize Tesla's future value structure.

In recent years, Musk's energy has been highly dispersed among multiple projects. In addition to Tesla, he has also been deeply involved in SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, xAI and other businesses, sometimes even leaving the market with the impression that "Tesla is just one of his many projects."This kind of "attention drift" has caused investor uneasiness, especially as Tesla is facing intensified global competition, rising profit pressure, and AI transformation still needs to be verified. The market is increasingly hoping that Musk can refocus more energy. Focus on the company's core growth and redemption path.

What's special about this incentive plan is that instead of setting goals based on traditional stock options, company market value or short-term financial performance, it binds the incentive structure to several challenging yet highly aligned KPIs in Tesla's long-term strategic direction: such as realizing a large-scale autonomous taxi network, bulk delivery of Optimus robots, increasing adjusted EBITDA to hundreds of billions of dollars, and achieving breakthroughs in vertical integration of AI and hardware.The setting of each goal means that Musk must personally step down and promote the implementation of the company's core strategy before he can be qualified to honor the corresponding salary.

Musk spends $1 billion to double his bet on "Tesla AI"

In less than a week after the salary plan was proposed, Musk purchased Tesla shares on a large scale through the open market between September 11 and 12, purchasing a total of approximately 2.57 million shares, with a total amount of nearly 1 billion U.S. dollars.

Analysts believe that as Tesla's most important "insider", Musk's share purchase is seen as a "vote of confidence" in the electric vehicle company.In terms of amount, this is the largest purchase in his history.Data platform Verity shows that such stock purchases are extremely rare for Musk. The last time he bought Tesla shares was on February 14, 2020, when he only purchased about 200,000 shares and spent only about 10 million U.S. dollars.

Daniellves, head of global technology research at U.S. investment bank Wedbush, said the latest stock purchase "is a huge signal of confidence for Tesla bulls, indicating that Musk is doubling down on Tesla's artificial intelligence plans."”

Before June, Tesla's share price fell by nearly 45%, and the market's doubts about its valuation logic and profit model continued to grow.But since July, with the launch of Model Y L products, the strengthening of the narrative of autonomous driving and AI directions, and the intensive release of Musk's personal capital injection and strategic binding, investor confidence has been significantly restored.In the most recent month, the stock price has rebounded by 20%-25%, and the cumulative increase in six months has expanded to 70%-80%.As of press time, Tesla has turned from decline to rise during the year.

So, is the future direction of Tesla's share price really reaching an inflection point?

Despite the recent strong trend, Wall Street is still divided on Tesla's future outlook.Most investment banks and research institutions have become cautious, and stock prices are generally expected to fluctuate around US$300 in the next 12 months, slightly lower than current levels.In the latest MarketBeat consensus, the average target price of 41 analysts for TSLA for the next 12 months is US$303, while the current price is close to US$410, with a 25%-30% correction space.In terms of ratings,"Hold" has become mainstream, showing that the market's confidence in continuing to rise sharply in the short term is still limited.

Of course, there are also optimists such as Wedbush who continue to set a target price above $500, but this view is still in the minority.The core focus of the market has gradually shifted from simple delivery volume and revenue expansion to new businesses with high uncertainties such as the redemption of AI capabilities and the commercialization of humanoid robots.This means that even if Musk personally increases the number, it will not be possible to completely eliminate the risks and fluctuations in the future route.