Tesla’s Stock Crashes 10% After Elon Musk Tweets That Its Price Is “Too High”

OfficeChai Team

Elon Musk has been tweeting again.

Elon Musk unleashed a — even by his standards — bizarre tweetstorm yesterday, in which he claimed that Tesla’s stock price was too high. Musk’s wild ride on Twitter began when he first tweeted that he was selling all of his possessions. “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,” he declared. 

A minute later, he came up with this bombshell. “Tesla stock price is too high imo (in my opinion),” he wrote.

But the night was just getting started for Musk. “Now give people back their FREEDOM,” he thundered four minutes later, an apparent reference to his tweets from the day before, in which he’d implied that government lock-downs that prevented people from leaving their own homes were tantamount to fascism.

 

Around 10 minutes later, Musk began tweeting the lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner, the American national anthem.

A little while later, he tweeted that his girlfriend, the singer Grimes, was “mad” at him. Elon Musk said that he and Grimes were expecting their first child on Monday.

Now amidst this apparent trainwreck, that can perhaps be put down to Musk being “too high”, was a tweet with real-world implications: Musk had said that the price of the Tesla stock was too high. For an executive to make a public assertion of this nature is extraordinary, and Tesla’s stock price promptly crashed 10 percent.

tesla stock price crashes after elon musk tweet

Soon enough, the jokes and the memes began. Some people who held Tesla shares began tweeting to Musk saying that they’d lost money because of his tweets. 

Other people wondered what had caused Musk to tweet what he did.

While others wondered what the repercussions of the tweet would be.

Musk is no stranger to getting into trouble because of his tweeting. In 2018, Elon Musk had, out of the blue, tweeted that he was planning to take Tesla public at a stock price of $420, and claimed that the funding was secured. As a result, Tesla’s stock had immediately jumped, but Musk had gotten into trouble with the SEC for intentionally manipulating a stock price — it later transpired that the funding wasn’t quite as secured as he’d implied. Musk had been sued by several people, and had ended up being fined $20 million, and had been stripped of the position of  Tesla Chairman.

Musk, though, has tweeted again, and there’s no telling where his latest escapade will land him. Tesla has already lost $14 billion in value since his tweet, and the SEC would also presumably be looking into the matter. Musk is a already a once-in-a-generation entrepreneur, and he’s now showing that he comes with once-in-a-generation eccentricities as well.