After a tough week, Tesla stock was up early Monday. Tweets from CEO Elon Musk might be helping.
Shares of the electric-vehicle maker were up over 4% at $396.84.
There wasn't much fundamental news on which to pin gains -- no Wall Street upgrades or downgrades. Investors are waiting for Tesla to report second-quarter delivery figures on Thursday. Analysts project 409,000 cars sold, according to FactSet, up from about 384,000 sold in the second quarter of 2025.
The broader market was helping. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average were up 0.8% and 0.3%, respectively.
Musk appears to be helping, too. He tweeted on Monday that Tesla was rolling out a new version of its Full Self Driving $(FSD)$ driver-assistance hardware to Tesla owners with AI3 hardware.
AI3 is the computer inside a Tesla that was introduced in 2019. New Tesla vehicles have AI4 hardware, which was introduced in 2023. AI4 amounts to a better, more powerful computer, able to run more advanced applications.
"Nice work by the [Tesla AI team]!" wrote Musk. "The AI3 computer only has about 15% of the effective memory bandwidth of AI4, so this was a tough challenge."
For investors, that means that Tesla owners with AI3 hardware might be incentivized to buy FSD subscriptions for $99 a month. FSD is capable of doing most of the driving most of the time, but still requires human supervision all of the time.
Musk also tweeted on Sunday that SpaceX. Grok 4.5 AI model was "perhaps" better than products from Anthropic.
He also pointed out that the model was being used by SpaceX and Tesla, another example of the deepening relationship between the two companies. The pair are working on AI applications that could run on computing power in idle Teslas. They are also building a semiconductor-making facility together called TeraFab.
Tesla also owns a small stake in SpaceX. And, of course, Elon Musk runs both companies.
Those ties have led to Wall Street speculation that a Tesla/SpaceX merger could come in the next 12 to 18 months. Whether it will is anyone's guess. If it does, it will be the largest merger in history. SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history in early June.
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