As the CEO of Tesla, you wouldn't expect Elon Musk to be the one to do any harm to the company, but unfortunately he ended up causing its stock to fall by a whopping $14,000,000,000 with just one tweet.
I guess we all make mistakes, right? They're just not usually multi-billion dollar ones. At least, not in my case.
But I suppose when you're the first person in history to surpass a $400,000,000,000 net worth, they're the kind of figures you're playing with on a daily basis.
Advert
Musk's inadvertent hit on Tesla took place in 2020, when Musk took to Twitter - back when it was still Twitter - with a complaint about the electric car company’s stock price.
All it took was six words, and Tesla share prices were started to dramatically sink, according to reports at the time.
CNBC reported that Tesla shares dropped as much as 12 percent before closing down to 10.3 after the tweet, while the BBC said that a staggering $14 billion was knocked off the carmaker’s value.
Not only that, but the tweet resulted in $3 billion being wiped from Musk’s own stake in Tesla.
Advert
So, what six words could do so much damage?
In his tweet, Musk wrote: "Tesla stock price too high imo."
That's it. He thought it was too high, and as a result chaos ensued.
Musk later admitted to the Wall Street Journal that his damaging post had not been looked over by the company before he posted it.
Advert
Following the message, Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told Reuters: “We view these Musk comments as tongue in cheek and it's Elon being Elon.
“It's certainly a headache for investors for him to venture into this area as his tweeting remains a hot button issue and [Wall] Street clearly is frustrated.”
Though the tweet did result in a big loss for Tesla, the car company clearly managed to survive the incident and has a market capitalization of $1.31 trillion at the time of writing (December 13).
Advert
Meanwhile, Musk surpassed the heady milestone of a $400,000,000,000 net worth earlier this week, when he was declared $198 billion richer than the second richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of $249 billion.
The news comes as Musk prepares to take on a new role in the White House, as President-Elect Donald Trump announced him as his pick to lead the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump went on to explain that the pair would 'pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the 'Save America' Movement'.
Topics: Elon Musk, Tesla, Twitter, Business, Technology, Social Media
Emily Brown