- After a tweet about the share price of Tesla, founder Elon Musk wiped $14bn off the carmaker’s worth & it also cost him $3bn of his stake.
After a tweet about the share price of Tesla, founder Elon Musk wiped $14bn off the carmaker’s worth & it also cost him $3bn of his stake.
“Tesla stock price incredibly high IMO,” he said, one of many tweets that included a pledge to sell his house.
He said his mother was angry at him in other tweets, while another simply read: “Anger, anger against disappearing from the light of consciousness.” In 2018, a tweet about Tesla’s prospects on the New York stock exchange contributed to regulators fining him $20 m and promising to get any such messages pre-screened by lawyers on the site.
Tesla stock price is too high imo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020
The Wall Street Journal confirmed that the billionaire had been asked if he was kidding about the share price tweet and whether it had been checked, receiving the response “No.”
The share price of Tesla has risen this year, putting the valuation of the electric carmaker at nearly $100bn, a level that would cause a bonus payout to the founder of hundreds of millions of dollars.
“We see these Musk comments as tongue in cheek and it’s Elon being Elon. It’s certainly a challenge for investors to venture into this field as his tweeting remains a hot button topic and [Wall] Street is irritated,” Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives told Reuters news agency.
Mr. Musk tweeted in 2018 that he may have raised funds to potentially withdraw Tesla from the stock exchange and take it private, which led to fluctuations in share price once again. The Securities and Exchange Commission found it to be a market-moving statement, fined it and pressured Tesla to carry out tests to ensure it did not happen again.
But a federal judge last month said Tesla and Musk would face a shareholder lawsuit over the going-private tweet, including a charge that Mr. Musk tried to defraud them.
Earlier this week he tweeted some heavy criticism of The stay-at-home restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic to his 33.4 million followers. In 2019, after tweeting that a British diver as a “pedo man,” he found himself in court last year.
Mr. Musk said his house, formerly owned by actor and producer Gene Wilder, was included in the promise to sell his possessions and bought in 2013.
“One stipulation on rent,” he tweeted, “I own the old house of Gene Wilder. I can’t knock it down or sacrifice any of its soul.”
