Welcome back from the Christmas weekend. I'm Phil Rosen, reporting from Los Angeles.

Usually in December the talk of the town is upbeat and cheerful — holiday music plays and White Elephant exchanges are all the rage.

And usually the world's leading electric vehicle brand, Tesla, joins in on that cheer.

Despite being the most shorted stock of all time, Elon Musk's company has finished years' past with massive climbs.

That's not quite the case for 2022 though.

Tesla is among the S&P 500's biggest losers this year, and most of its meteoric pandemic gains have been all but wiped out.

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1. Elon Musk has pointed to the Fed as reason for Tesla's declines, with the company's market cap shedding $600 billion on the year.

But now that macro headwinds have made it historically cheap (and Tesla bears have made a killing on it this year), Musk said it offers a buying opportunity.

"I keep saying that Fed rate is insane, because data I'm seeing says we're already in deflation," he tweeted last week. "If true, then real rate of return of T-bills is roughly that of S&P500. Very smart investor I spoke to today said he's shorting S&P…"

Inflation soared to a 40-year high of 9.1% in June, and with the most recent data clocking in north of 7%, it remains far above the Fed's 2% goal.

The central bank has attempted to cool prices with an extremely aggressive series of interest rate hikes.

The idea is that those higher rates flow through into larger returns from savings accounts and government bonds, which makes higher risk investments like  stocks less appealing in comparison.

But to Musk, prices have already started dropping, which eliminates the need for the Fed to keep rates so high. As he wrote in another tweet last week:

"In simple terms: as bank savings account interest rates, which are guaranteed, start to approach stock market returns, which are not guaranteed, people will increasingly move their money out of stocks into cash, thus causing stocks to drop."

While Musk isn't wrong that demand for stocks has waned, there's still a flaw in his argument, according to Tesla investor and Future Fund manager Gary Black.

"Elon - you can't compare a very short duration bank with long duration $TSLA stock... Since you closed on TWTR, TSLA [is down] -38% vs NDX [Nasdaq 100] -1%. If it was all [interest] rates, NDX would be down a similar amount," Black tweeted at Musk.

In other words, while higher interest rates undoubtedly drag on stocks, that doesn't explain why Tesla has seen outsized losses since Musk closed his purchase of Twitter.