Tesla shares fall as Musk says stock too high in 2018-style tweets
- Chief executive Elon Musk’s Twitter burst followed a profane rant during Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday
- He railed against shutdown orders aimed at containing the coronavirus and compared shelter-in-place measures with forcible imprisonment
Tesla shares plunged after Elon Musk said the electric car maker’s stock is too high in a stream of tweets reminiscent of the posts that securities regulators sued him over in 2018.
Musk, chief executive of Tesla, posted more than a dozen times in a span of less than a 75 minutes on Friday, claiming he was selling “almost all” of his physical possessions and will not own a house. He also renewed his call for reopening the US economy.
Hours later, Tesla’s head of human resources for North America told employees that furloughs will be extended at least another week. The carmaker’s shares fell 10 per cent to close at US$701.32.
Musk, 48, told The Wall Street Journal in an email that he was not joking and his tweets were not vetted before he posted them. Tesla’s stock is still up 68 per cent for the year, an advance that has put him in position to meet the final performance threshold he needs to receive stock options that would yield a windfall of about US$730 million.
“We view these comments as tongue-in-cheek and it’s Elon being Elon,” Dan Ives, a Wedbush Securities analyst with a hold rating on Tesla, said in an email. “It’s certainty a headache for investors for him to venture into this area as his tweeting remains a hot-button issue.”