Tesla electric vehicles park in the parking lot at the Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin-Brandenburg.
Patrick Pleul | Image Alliance | Getty Images
Tesla shares continued to fall on Friday in what appeared to be a case of investors profiting from the electric car maker's furious post-US election rally.
At around 6:30 a.m. EST, the company's shares fell 5% in pre-opening trading in the US, deepening losses from the beginning of the week. Tesla shares fell 8% on Wednesday, marking their worst day yet Donald Trump November victory in the presidential elections.
Trump's victory sent Tesla's stock price soaring as investors increased their bets that the electric vehicle company would benefit from its CEO Elon Musk's close ties to the president-elect.
Musk was appointed by Trump to co-lead the newly created one Department of Government Effectivenessalso called “DOGE”. The acronym for the proposed presidential advisory commission shares its name with the internet meme that inspired the so-called “memecoin” cryptocurrency, or dogecoin.
Dogecoin the price briefly increased after the body was created.
Federal Election Commission documents show that Musk was a major supporter of Trump during the Republican election campaign and contributed $277 million primarily to the campaign. There is musk the richest man in the worldAccording to Forbes, his net worth is $439.4 billion.
Last month, Bloomberg News reported that Trump's transition team plans to implement a federal framework to regulate autonomous vehicles.
The Tesla-Trump transition team did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on the report.
If true, the move would represent a significant boost for Musk's electric vehicle company. Tesla associates its future with the idea of introducing a mass fleet of autonomous vehicles, called “robotaxi” services. At the company's “We Robot” event in October, Musk presented the Cybercab autonomous concept car.
Tesla has however, it fell short of Musk's promise to offer truly autonomous vehicles. Tesla's Autopilot and paid “Full Self-Drive” services still require a human behind the wheel to supervise the system and take over control if necessary.
In other Tesla-related news, data released on Thursday by the European Automobile Manufacturers Association showed Tesla car sales fell 40.9% in November, outpacing the overall 9.5% decline in battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales in the EU.