Supply chain woes knock Tesla shares

TESLA shares slumped after boss Elon Musk admitted the electric car maker has suffered a ‘very tough quarter’.

In an email to employees over the weekend, billionaire Musk, the world’s richest man, said the firm was dealing with ‘supply chain and production challenges in China’ and that staff would ‘need to rally hard’ to recover.

Tesla shares tumbled 7.1pc to $647.21 on Wall Street after the emails emerged.

Musk’s admission of a difficult few months came after production at the company’s Shanghai factory closed down for weeks as Chinese authorities introduced strict lockdown measures to try to contain an outbreak of Covid-19 in the city.

Despite this, the Tesla boss said production at the plant was ‘returning to full strength’, adding that its factory in Austin, Texas, was ‘spooling up’ while its plant in Fremont, California, had achieved an ‘all-time record’ for daily production last week.

But the views about a tough quarter for Tesla may add to existing fears among some investors that Musk is being side-tracked by efforts to take over Twitter.