Twitter CEO's Other Company Is Not Doing Very Well

Elon Musk blames inflation
By Mike L. Ford,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 27, 2022 10:15 AM CST
Twitter CEO's Other Company Is Not Doing Very Well
Elon Musk arrives at the justice center in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday, July 13, 2021. According to a filing posted late Dec. 14, 2022, by the SEC, Musk sold another $3.58 billion worth of Tesla stock during the week, but it wasn’t clear where the proceeds were being spent.   (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

Barring any profoundly unexpected news in the coming days, Tesla stock has achieved its worst-ever annual stock performance, losing roughly 70% of its value since its November 2021 peak, per the Wall Street Journal. It's not all CEO Elon Musk's fault, per se, as there are a host of other factors, including high interest rates and lower demand for Teslas. After all, they aren't the only electric vehicles on the market—just the only ones whose CEO also runs Twitter.

On that note, per Business Insider, Musk has sold $3.6 billion in Tesla shares this year in order to fund Twitter ops—a smidgeon compared to the $800 billion value Tesla has lost, but still not something investors love. Some big names have begged Musk to stop doing it, and as he told investors in a recent call, "You certainly have my commitment I won't sell stock until, I don't know, probably two years from now.” Tesla shares dumped nearly 9% on the news, settling around $123 compared to $362 a year ago, when the company was riding high with long waitlists for new cars and strong cash reserves after a long run of profitable quarters, per the Journal.

Not everyone lost on Tesla: As this analysis shows, short sellers made off with $15 billion, making it by far the most profitable short of the year. While Musk's Twitter/Tesla experiment plays out, rival automakers are churning out attractive EVs of their own, at least according to New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo, who test-drove "cheap ones, expensive ones, big ones, small ones, strange ones, boring ones," all of which pose serious competition that "makes Musk's recent role as the town crier for the red-pilled online right especially puzzling and, for his car company, perilous." According to Car and Driver, all the news means this might be a pretty good time to buy a Tesla, as the company is offering up $7,500 discounts and a slurry of other incentives. (More Tesla stories.)

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