Tesla Bears Pour Millions of Dollars Into Bearish Option Trades
$Tesla Motors(TSLA)$
An active buyer paid a $3.34 million premium for put options that give the holder the right to sell 160,000 Tesla shares at $210 each by Sept. 19. That’s the second biggest of the bearish Tesla option block trades posted Friday. The strike price is more than $50 below the current stock price.
Just minutes earlier, another bearish trade was posted, with the active buyer paying a $3.14 million premium to buy put options covering 150,000 Tesla shares with the same strike price and expiration date.
The bearish positions are building up as analysts cut their estimates on Tesla deliveries as sales in China and Europe declined. The company has faced backlash for its CEO Elon Musk’s politicking, with the stock losing about half of its value this year.
On average, analysts expect the company to report first quarter sales of 390,343 vehicles for the first quarter, estimates compiled by Bloomberg show. The number is down from their previous outlook of 468,973 vehicles on Jan. 1, weeks before President Donald Trump took over the White House after winning the November race against then President Joe Biden.
The company is expected to report its first quarter deliveries next week.
RBC Capital Markets’ estimates are even lower, with the brokerage projecting 364,372 deliveries for the quarter, MT Newswires reported Friday, citing RBC's note to clients.
Earlier this month, JPMorgan analysts including Ryan Brinkman and Rajat Gupta lowered their price target on Tesla to $120, from $135, noting “a sharply lower outlook for deliveries (and likely pricing also) as both existing customers and potential new buyers react toward the brand in myriad different ways, including staging protests at Tesla stores across the country and around the world, participating in sales boycotts, and jettisoning already purchased vehicles in the secondhand market.”
Musk has been targeted by protests for his involvement in Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency that was behind thousands of job cuts in the federal government.
“We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” the JPMorgan analysts said.
The closest example they said they could cite was “the decline in sales of Japanese and Korean brand vehicles in China in 2012 and 2017, respectively, amidst various diplomatic disputes (Japanese brand sales recovered after a year, while Korean brand sales never have).”
Still, they noted that the damage in those cases was confined to a single market, unlike with Tesla where the decline in sales seen in 2025 went beyond a specific nation or geography.
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