The stock slid on the downgrades of several Wall Street analysts who cover the stock. The important comments on Tesla's future fortunes came from Deutsche Bank's Rod Lache, who changed his rating to "hold" from "buy," but also raised his price target, to $280 from $245.

Lache argued in a research note that Tesla's value prospects are already reflected in the stock price — you could buy it, but in a sense the company's future growth has already been bought by investors, and that's what's driven the stock price higher over the past two years. So if you buy now, you're not going to be purchasing that growth. It's too late.

On Friday, Tesla announced that it had hired Ganesh Srivats, an executive at Burberry, to be the carmaker's North American luxury czar, Bloomberg reported. If hiring a Burberry executive to revamp an important Silicon Valley organization's sales-and-marketing apparatus sounds familiar, that's because Apple hired Burberry's CEO, Angela Ahrendts, to run its retail operations in 2014.