Shares of Elon Musk’s flagship company Tesla hit a new two-year low of $150.04 on Friday morning, sparking renewed concerns that the billionaire’s recent acquisition and chaotic management of Twitter are sinking the basis of his financial empire.
The plunge in shares came the morning after Musk booted several prominent journalists from the platform, and after Musk spent most of this week offloading more than 22 million Tesla shares, worth more than 3.5 billion dollars. Musk has now sold nearly $40 billion of the electric vehicle company’s stock over the past year.
Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter, a deal that was announced in April and finalized in October, has coincided with a truly abysmal 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 down 57.12 percent year to date, compared to NDXT which is down 35.53 percent. The company’s value has fallen from more than $1 trillion earlier this year to less than $500 billion, costing Musk his title of “world’s richest man” in the process.
Friday’s drop came after Musk suspended New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, Mashable’s Matt Binder, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, the freelance journalist Aaron Rupar, political commentator Keith Olbermann and freelance journalist Tony Webster. from Twitter. Most had criticized Musk’s content moderation decisions. Earlier this week, Musk impulsively rewrote Twitter’s content policies to make any post including real-time location data a banable offense. The platform-wide policy change appears to have been retroactively created to justify the platform removing the accounts of Jack Sweeney, who tracked the movements of private jets and planes using publicly available aviation data. Musk accused reporters covering Sweeney’s ban of publishing “my exact real-time location, basically the coordinates of murder, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter’s terms of service.” Rolling Stone has not identified any cases of reporters publishing direct coordinates to Musk’s location.
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Throughout the week, investors have called on Musk to find someone else to run Twitter’s day-to-day operations and to refocus on Tesla. On Wednesday, the EV company’s third-largest investor, Leo KoGuan, tweeted that Musk had “left Tesla” and that the company “has no CEO in place.” After the platform’s journalistic purge, investor Joe Cirincion tweeted a call for Musk to leave Twitter, accusing him of “killing the company with his antics.”
The company itself has admitted that they “rely heavily on the services of Elon Musk, Tesla’s Technoking and our CEO” to run the company. If investors have noticed, so have major financial institutions. Goldman Sachs cut its price targets for Tesla earlier this week, citing the increasingly “polarizing” nature of Tesla’s brand given Musk’s Twitter involvement, and recommended that the company return to the its “core attributes of sustainability and technology”.
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Musk also faces the threat of sanctions abroad. European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova on Friday accused the company of violating the EU Digital Services Act and the Media Freedom Act through its “arbitrary suspension of journalists.”
“There are red lines,” he tweeted. “And sanctions, soon.”