Elon Musk is notorious for being able to swing markets. In a great blog post from last year, Alex Hayes used the S&P500 as a control to estimate the causal effect of the tweet below on Tesla’s stock price. He used the excellent CausalImpact R package developed by Brodersen et al.
Maybe Elon Musk shouldn’t tweet? If he’s not getting himself into trouble with partner Grimes (for insensitively tweeting), then he’s putting $15 billion on the line by typing. That’s pretty much what the Tesla and Space-X CEO did this week, not too long after Tesla sent Bitcoin’s price soaring to a record high by investing $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency. Fast forward a few weeks, and things aren’t working out too well for Elon on that deal. How did that happen? Well, it’s complicated, and it likely has plenty to do with Elon’s apparent trigger fingers.
Elon Musk has upped his Twitter game, sending holders of Bitcoin and Tesla Inc. Scrambling during another bout of self-reflection. Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweets are the subject of another lawsuit. A Tesla investor is suing the company board and Musk for continuing to send “erratic tweets” that violate a settlement with. But the Twitter timeline scrolls on, headlines get buried and pushed into the latter pages of Google, and there are no repercussions. In an attempt to illustrate the overwhelming harm that has been done by Elon Musk this year, we’ve extracted his 69 worst tweets (a puerile reference he is quite fond of), starting with the trivially bad and moving to the legitimately harmful. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that Tesla’s stock price is 'too high imo,' and the stock fell immediately after. It’s another market-moving tweet from Musk, despite an agreement he made.
As Bloomberg reports, Monday was brutal on the Tesla front in the stock market. Tesla shares slid 8.6%, which eroded Musk’s net worth by $15.2 billion. This knocks him down to second place (with a still very manageable $183.4 billion) on the Bloomberg Billionaire’s list of most ridiculously wealthy people with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos taking the lead with a $186.3 billion net worth. How did Elon’s fortunes drastically change in the space of one day?
Elon tweeted (at 1:02 am on Saturday) that the value of Bitcoin does “seem high lol.”
That said, BTC & ETH do seem high lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2021
It’s not the savviest move to invest so much of Tesla’s money in a cryptocurrency and then call it overvalued. According to analyst Daniel Ives, who spoke with CNBC, “Musk is now tied to the bitcoin story in the eyes of the Street and although Tesla made a billion paper profit in its first month owning the digital gold, it comes with added risk, as seen this week.” Ives believes that Musk added a “side show” that “can overshadow the fundamental EV (electric vehicle) vision in the near term for investors.”
Elon Tweet Today
Also, that’s a mighty expensive tweet. And of course, Elon greeted Tuesday with one of his cryptic cryptocurrent tweets: “Excession.”
Musk Tweet
Excession
Elon Tweet Doge
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 23, 2021
Elon Tweet Game
This can be interpreted in multiple ways, no doubt, but maybe it’s time for Elon to take another (multi-day) Twitter break again. It couldn’t hurt!
Elon Tweets Dogecoin
(Via Bloomberg & CNBC)