Muskworld downward spiral spreads to Tesla

ELON MUSK’S FLAGSHIP company Tesla’s stock hit a new two-year low of $150.04 on Friday morning, prompting renewed concerns that the billionaire’s recent acquisition and chaotic management of Twitter is crumbling the bedrock of his financial empire.

The stock dive took place the morning after Musk booted several prominent journalists from the platform, and after Musk spent the better part of this week offloading more than 22 million shares of Tesla stock, worth over $3.5 billion. Musk has now sold almost $40 billion worth of the electric vehicle company’s stock in the last year.

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As of Friday, the company is down 57.12 percent year to date compared to the NDXT being down 35.53 percent. The value of the company has plummeted from over $1 trillion at the beginning of the year, to less than $500 billion, and has cost Musk his title of “world’s richest man” in the process.

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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 shift his focus back to Tesla. On Wednesday, the EV company’s third-largest investor Leo KoGuan, tweeted that Musk had “abandoned Tesla” and that the company “has no working CEO.” Following 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.”

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If investors have taken notice, so have major financial institutions. Goldman Sachs cut its price targets for Tesla earlier this week, citing the increasingly “polarizing” nature of Tesla’s branding given Musk’s involvement at Twitter, and recommended the company shift back to it’s “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 E.U.’s Digital Services Act and the Media Freedom Act through its “arbitrary suspension of journalists.”

“There are red lines,” she tweeted. “And sanctions, soon.”

  Rolling Stone

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Also...

Elon Musk on Wednesday told a Delaware judge that he plans to "reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time."

  Axios

From this case:

Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta hopes to prove that Musk used his dominance over the electric vehicle maker's board to craft [his] 2018 [$56 billion pay] package and then duped investors into approving it.

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The first day of a week-long trial in Wilmington, Delaware, featured testimony from Ira Ehrenpreis, a Tesla director since 2007, who was pressed to explain why the board did not demand that Musk dedicate himself to the company full-time.

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Musk, speaking virtually to a business conference on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Monday said he had too much on his plate at the moment.

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Tornetta has asked the court to rescind the pay package, which Tornetta's attorney Greg Varallo said was $20 billion larger than the annual gross domestic product of the state of Delaware.

Musk and Tesla's directors, who are also defendants, have denied Tornetta's allegations, arguing that the pay package ensured the entrepreneur would guide Tesla through a critical period, which helped drive the stock tenfold higher.

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The disputed Tesla package allows Musk to buy 1% of Tesla's stock at a deep discount each time escalating performance and financial targets are met. Otherwise, Musk gets nothing.

Tesla has hit 11 of the 12 targets as its value ballooned briefly to more than $1 trillion from $50 billion, according to court papers.

A decision will likely take around three months after the trial and could be appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court.

  Reuters

UPDATE 12/28/22: