Love it or hate it, people are talking about the Tesla Cybertruck. Tesla kept it a well guarded secret, bringing much anticipation and speculation. Here we'll give an overview of the general public's reaction and compare that with stock price movement.

Tesla (TSLA) is actually one of the first companies we started tracking at SocialSentiment.io. It's a case study in contrasting opinions on social media, making it ideal for our machine learning training and testing. It's also interesting to observe investor opinion sometimes matching and sometimes opposing public opinion.

Social Media's Reaction to the Cybertruck

Let's take a look at the SocialSentiment.io chart for Tesla for the last 30 days.

The Cybertruck was announced by Tesla on November 21, 2019, late in the day. You'll quickly notice in our chart that before this date we tracked mixed sentiment for Tesla on social media. Activity (likes and shares) was relatively low. On November 21 we gauged a small increase in sentiment as people started talking about it. Over the following 4 days we noticed a very positive overall sentiment online.

It's not obvious from the chart but there was significant negative reaction to the Cybertruck online as well. In our analysis we observed the high volume and activity of positive posts outweighed the negative. After November 26 we see the public excitement settling while still generally positive for Tesla.

Stock Market's Reaction to the Cybertruck

Now let's compare that to the stock price of TSLA over the exact same period (courtesy of Google).

The stock price hovered around $350 for the week prior to the announcement. The day after the announcement the stock dropped significantly. Investors were clearly not impressed. My personal guess is this was due to a combination of investors who didn't like the truck itself plus those who realized the Cybertruck's appearance was polarizing, and therefore may not translate into positive sales. Pre-order numbers from Elon Musk over the following week didn't make much of an impact to the stock price. The stock picked up again after some analysts raised or re-iterated their positive forecasts for TSLA.

These two charts are interesting because the 7 day moving average of our social sentiment scores appear to correlate roughly with the stock price, with the notable exception of the contrasting reaction to the Cybertruck announcement. We'll continue watching for significant sentiment swings and market movements.

Full disclosure: The author of this article owns shares of TSLA