If you’re old enough to remember the “stimmy” go-go days of 2021, you may recall that year’s late-October/early-November crash-up in shares of Tesla.

Long story short, the Reddit crowd had by then figured out how to engineer self-fulfilling prophecies in their favorite stocks via so-called weaponized gamma (basically the harnessing of options math to co-opt dealers into a legal market manipulation scheme).

It wasn’t just the Reddit crowd, of course, but 2021 was the year WallStreetBets took over the world, so references to that year’s “everything bubble” almost invariably include Reddit mentions and allusions to the GameStop saga.

On October 25 of that fateful year, Tesla announced a purchase deal with Hertz (which was itself a popular name among the meme crowd). The shares proceeded to accelerate. On October 22, 2021, just before the Hertz deal was in the news, they were $300 or so. By November 4, they were $410.

The ferocity of that rally was due in part to options dynamics, and specifically short-dated calls which speculators bought in abundance, putting dealers behind the negative convexity eight ball. As the shares went vertical, dealers had to hedge the delta, driving (no pun intended) further gains for the stock.

Well, guess what? It’s back:

“[T]he net positive delta impulse [TSLA options] have generated over the past week [is] 100%ile… since 2023,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott wrote Tuesday.

I talked early this week about Tesla as the most liquid (and for most investors, the only liquid) way to get upside exposure to Elon Musk. Plainly, the massive run-up in Tesla since the election has exactly nothing to do with Robotaxis or electric cars and everything to do with the Musk-Trump nexus.

“In light of the newfound proximity of Musk to President-elect Trump, TSLA [is a] proxy vehicle for growth initiatives beyond autos into all things innovation, from AI to space travel to renewables to robotics to manufacturing,” McElligott said.

JonesTrading’s Mike O’Rourke seems skeptical, as is his wont. I don’t know who ol’ Mike voted for, but my experience with his daily missives suggests there’s no partisan inclination strong enough to override O’Rourke’s skepticism towards anything that looks like a bubble. “We understand Musk was pivotal in the election, but adding $345 billion in market capitalization in four sessions is like adding a Bank of America,” he mused. “Musk has proven he is capable of amazing things, but Tesla is still a company that needs to execute in the real world.”

Yes, but Mike: We don’t live in the real world anymore. We live in a simulation. And guess who’s controlling it?

Jokes aside, the Tesla stats from the last few sessions are nothing short of “eye-watering,” as Charlie put it. The company singlehandedly accounted for 28% of the Nasdaq 100’s return from November 4 through Monday, and 15% of the entire S&P return over that same period, he noted.

The figures, from McElligott again, give you a sense of the company’s domination in the options space.

On November 11, the notional traded across TSLA options was 30% of overall US equity options notional. On November 8, it was 41%. “Equally WOW,” Charlie went on, the notional value of TSLA stock was 10% of the total value of all US cash equities trading on Monday.

It’s Elon’s world, folks. Trump’s just president of it.