Matching events to stock movements doesn't work, because investors use other sources to estimate sales beforehand, and compete hard with each other to find out first. So the information was already priced in. Low sales do impact the stock, but _when_ they impact it is complicated and unintuitive.

Why does this largely only apply to the stock symbol TSLA?

Tesla declaring bankruptcy, stock +5%

Starship turns out to be a modern-day Moonraker. London, Paris, and DC are now smoking radioactive craters. Stock +8%

Worked for Bed, Bath and Beyond, fsvo ‘worked’.

It's not a car company. It's a cult.

Or maybe this wasn't a surprise to anyone and was already priced in, and then the final numbers were slightly better than the general consensus expectation? Could be that too.

But you're right, everyone who owns stock in Tesla is probably the member of a cult, no need to think any harder about it.

TSLA is in the S&P 500 index so large numbers of people doing index investing own shares of it without thinking hard about its individual performance.

Yes but are those the marginal buyers and sellers that drive price movements? Most people in index funds are probably not flitting in and out of index positions at anything approaching even medium frequency.

Index investing doesn't steer price, it simply follows it.

"This is it." https://i.imgur.com/Oq5clQh.png