Photo by Milan Csizmadia on Unsplash
Unfortunately, 2022 wasn’t Tesla’s best year in business, and perhaps not for its CEO either. Elon Musk had to sell massive quantities of shares of Tesla to buy Twitter for $44 billion and lost his position as the world’s richest man. This sell-off of shares devalued the stock, and Tesla lost its spot as the world’s best-selling brand of EVs. As a result, Tesla shares fell to their lowest in 2022, and the EV maker failed to meet its EV delivery target, even after cutting prices to attract buyers for its Tesla Model 3 and Model Y EVs by around 9% in China, its biggest market.
At the beginning of December, Tesla was offering U.S. buyers a $3,750 credit, hoping to get people to buy its EVs before the end of 2022. By the last week of December, the EV maker increased the discount to $7,500 and tacked on an offer of 10,000 free supercharging miles. Hopefully, 2023 will be a better year. The U.S. Treasury Department will release EV tax credit rules around the sourcing of critical materials in March 2023, so Tesla expects the new $7,500 discount to attract more buyers soon and should give some thanks to the 2022 U.S. government.