With Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway at an all-time high, it’s worth noting that Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock is up 1.08 million percent — not a typo — since September of 1976.

The market’s tech rout continued yesterday, sending US stocks lower. The S&P 500 fell 0.5%, the Nasdaq 100 gave back 1.2%, and the Russell 2000 dipped 0.4%. This marked the fourth straight day of losses for the S&P 500, and the Magnificent 7 closed 10% below their December all-time high.

Tesla shares fell 9% yesterday, dropping to $303, following news that sales were down an eye-watering 45% in Europe. Shares hit a high of just under $480 shortly before Christmas after a postelection romp, but have been declining slowly — and then quickly — over the course of the year so far. 

That said, it’s a little curious why exactly some admittedly rough European sales numbers have much valence on Tesla’s stock price at all, at least enough to send the price down by 9% in a single day. After all, since when is Tesla trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of 175 because of a few thousand vehicle sales in the EU? 

But Tesla’s valuation and stock price haven’t been strongly correlated with its actual business selling vehicles in ages. Heck, its price gyrations are more closely linked to the price of crypto than they are to the US stock market, a unique quality among companies of its size and value. Tesla trades where it does because an investment in the company is a wager on the ability of the richest person in the world to operate a business that will continue to gain in value. 

This makes the price drop somewhat odd. Why did the market cap of Tesla drop by over $85 billion in an afternoon? Is it because it sold 9,945 new cars in Europe in January instead of the 18,161 it did last January? Or is it actually something else?

This volatility is probably not just because of European car sales. If Tesla the vehicle is losing its mojo in Europe, that’s an especially big problem because Tesla the company’s valuation is heavily based on mojo, and it’s one of many high-flying stocks that have been getting crushed as of late. The chart in Europe looks gnarly, sure, but the implication is gnarlier. 

Mere months have passed since Nvidia last reported earnings, but that may as well have been an alternate universe, and everyone is waiting to see if it’s Superman coming to save the earnings day or if his Bizarro counterpart will continue to rule the stock’s trend line.

Last November, the chip designer was flying high, soaring 25% in the two months prior to its report. This time, however, the stock is slouching. As you can see in this chart, the price action is a negative mirror image, with the stock suffering the biggest one-day monetary loss for any stock, ever, last month.

The fundamental backdrop hasn’t changed too much over the course of three months. But the vibes, as the kids say, have shifted. Notwithstanding megacap tech companies’ commitment to spend some $315 billion on capex this year to bolster their AI capabilities, investors are seemingly looking through the current year and wondering when this supercharged spending binge will materially inflect lower. The emergence of DeepSeek and worries that Microsoft may be fully stocked on data centers might be causing some fraying of the everything-AI-to-the-moon thesis.

Check out Plug Power’s market cap, our Markets Editor’s pick for the most interesting stock chart in the history of forever.

The number of office-to-apartment conversions currently in progress across the US is up 28% from last year. 

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