Elon Muskflagship of business teslaShares hit a new two-year low of $150.04 on Friday morning, raising fresh concerns that the billionaire’s recent acquisition and chaotic management of Twitter is crumbling the foundations of his financial empire.
The stock plunge came the morning after Musk ousted several prominent journalists from the platform, and after Musk spent most of this week downloading more than 22 million shares of Tesla stock, worth more than $3.5 billion. Musk has now sold almost $40 billion value of the shares of the electric vehicle company in the last year.
Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter, a deal announced in April and finalized in October, has coincided with a truly dismal year for tech markets. But Tesla has underperformed the NASDAQ Technology Sector Index (NDXT) by more than 20 points. As of Friday, the company is below 57.12 percent year to date compared to the NDXT was down 35.53 percent. The value of the company has collapsed from more than $1 trillion at the beginning of the year, to less than $500 billion, and it has cost Musk his title of “the richest man in the world” in the process.
Friday’s drop came after Musk was suspended New York Times reporter ryan mack, the washington post‘s drew harwellMashable’s matte foldercnn reporter Donie O’Sullivanthe interception micah readsfreelance reporter Aaron Rupar, political commentator Keith Olbermann and freelance journalist Tony Webster of Twitter. Most had criticized Musk’s content moderation decisions. Earlier this week, Musk impulsively rewrote Twitter’s content policies to deem any post that includes real-time location data a prohibited offence. The platform-wide policy change appears to have been created retroactively to justify the platform. Deleting Jack Sweeney accounts, which tracked the movements of airplanes and private jets through publicly available aviation data. Musk accused journalists covering Sweeney’s ban of posting “my exact location in real time, basically the coordinates of the murder, in (obviously) direct violation of Twitter’s terms of service.” Rolling Stone it has not identified any cases in which journalists have published direct coordinates of Musk’s location.
During the week, investors have called at Musk to find someone else to run Twitter’s day-to-day operations and shift his focus back to Tesla. On Wednesday, the electric vehicle company’s third-largest investor, Leo KoGuan, tweeted that Musk had “abandoned Tesla” and that the company “does not have an acting CEO.” After the journalistic purification of the platform, investor Joe Cirincion tweeted a call Musk quits Twitter, accusing him of “killing the company with his antics.”
the company itself has admitted that they are “highly dependent on the services of Elon Musk, Tesla Technoking, and our CEO,” to run the company. If investors have taken notice, so have major financial institutions. Goldman Sachs cut your price targets for Tesla earlier this week, citing the increasingly “polarizing” nature of the Tesla brand given Musk’s involvement with Twitter, and recommended that the company return to its “core attributes of sustainability and technology.”
Musk is also facing the threat of sanctions abroad European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova on Friday accused the company of having violated the EU’s Digital Services Act and the Freedom of the Media Act through its “arbitrary suspension of journalists.”
“There are red lines,” he said. tweeted. And sanctions, soon.
