With just 5 minutes remaining in the trading day on Wednesday, Tesla posted a statement on its official website that says "Announcing the Tesla Model W." In the statement the company claimed to be launching a whole new product line.
This boosted their stocks trading and the price actually jumped about $1.50 or about 0.75 percent from its level the moment before to as high as $188.50. There were almost 400,000 shares traded in that time frame and it is considered as one of the heaviest one minutes of trading volume in the stock ever.
By the end of the trading day, Tesla shares retraced back to $187.59.
According to the Fortune, the first paragraph of Tesla's announcement said: "Tesla today announced a whole new product line called the Model W. As many in the media predicted, it's a watch. That's what the "W" stands for."
But by the time the prank was discovered, the ripple effect of the announcement had already started and some other news organizations had started publishing headlines based on Tesla's announcement. Reuters was one of them and they had to take down their articles based on the announcement. A Reuters spokeswoman said "We have withdrawn the headlines and regret putting out the material."
But if you didn't already know, this was one of the two April Fool's Day pranks produced by Tesla on Wednesday. The other prank included a video that promoted a new self-driving card that will help owners to evade traffic and parking tickets.
We guess it is a good sign that companies are taking this opportunity to have fun with the world, because everyone likes to have fun.
