This may have been posted already but it’s the first I’ve seen that officially confirms that Twitter hasn’t been paying rent in the office that Elon forced everyone back into.
Based on my inside information this probably isn’t malicious but is moreso just indicative of the chaos that is currently Twitter – everyone who knew how to pay the basic bills was fired.
Is anyone still carrying water for this asshole? Is the right still trying spin this as some genius 4D chess move?
Yes. He did a recent podcast with his fan club and there was much scrambling to make sense of his behavior.
I mean, I’d still take him as president over Trump or DeSantis. Maybe he’s just trying to demonstrate how low the bar is.
So did Jeremy Renner…
The take I’ve been hearing is “He’s moving Twitter out of the woke libtard cities to REAL AMERICA™”.
I’d take an inanimate carbon rod over trump or DeSantis. And also over Elmo.
It’s starting to look like Tesla is beginning the process of ousting Elmo - they’ve promoted the head of Tesla China to run North American sales, and the North America VP will now report to him instead of to Elmo.
I don’t know if you’re right that this is part of the process of ousting Elmo, but the stock has continued to collapse, giving up all the gains from its dead cat bounce and is making new lows today, despite the tech sector rallying. Down 13%, below $107.
The consolation for stockholders is that this incremental decline is much smaller when expressed as a percentage of where TSLA stock was trading when he bought Twitter. Down 63% to down 68%, just seems like a minor market fluctuation today.
TSLA is going down mainly on China news. China is currently a mess, and Tesla is heavily dependent on the Chinese supply chain and Chinese sales. Rivian is down almost 87%. Nio, the Chinese EV car maker, is still going down.
This isn’t a ‘tech’ problem or a Musk problem, it’s an EV problem. Pretty much every EV stock is going down. It’s also a general car maker problem, because the combination of inflation, supply chain issues, higher interest rates and a looming recession is killing them. Ford is down 50% in the last year. GM down 49%.
You are right that it’s foolish to suggest that Musk is the sole cause of Tesla’s problems, but it’s equally foolish to suggest that his antics with Twitter are not a significant contributing factor. When your company is faced with looming difficulties like this, you want a CEO who is focused and wise. Not the first two adjectives that spring to mind with Musk’s recent behavior.
Tesla is not just having supply-chain issues, there is decreased demand greater than the other car companies.
It may well be that initial demand has peaked and the company is transitioning into a new phase, but that’s a bad time for the CEO’s antics.
RIVN’s low in 2022 (early May) was $20.60 or so, they’re at $17.34 right now. Ford’s low in 2022 was $11.06, they’re at $11.68 today. GM’s 2022 low as $30.87 (both Ford and GM lows were in July), they’re at $33.82 today. The lowest TSLA got in that same May to July time period was $209.39 ($108.10 today).
If you want to get even simpler, in the last 6 months Ford and GM are actually up, and RIVN is down 35% to TSLA’s 53%.
eta: RIVN also IPOed in Nov 2021, they were pretty clearly overvalued from the get go but lost most of that value in the first 6 months. They’re really not a great comparison stock.
Tesla took a hit in September/October like a lot of the EV makers did, but a lot of them are also recovering - particularly the Chinese ones, given most of them had good Decembers. Tesla has its own idiosyncratic problems going on.
I’ve said already that Musk’s behaviour on Twitter is hurting Tesla, but given that Rivian, Nio and other EV car stocks are down about as much or more than Tesla suggests it isn’t the biggest factor, or even a major one. Tesla would be hurting right now if Musk never went near Twitter. And frankly, it’s time. Tesla’s valuation was nuts, and due mostly to the frothy bubble economy we’ve been living in. Even Musk has said that Tesla was way over-valued. Fortunes have been lost shorting Tesla because so many heavy stock buyers couldn’t believe its valuation could possibly hold. They just got the timing wrong.
On a pure price to earnings basis, Tesla is STILL overvalued. Its PE today is 33.8, while the Fortune 500 is 27.7, which is also overvalued compared to its historical ratio of 19. The NASDAQ average is about 23 right now.
I don’t know about the Fortune 500, but the S&P (can’t be much different) trailing P/E is 19.7. I think you may have picked up the Schiller CAPE.
That’s not what I’m seeing. Rivian went down 41% in December. Nio dropped 21% in December. Lucid dropped about 40% in December.
We’re getting into real ‘numbers games’ territory now. I can counter that with the month of December, in which Rivian dropped 41% and Tesla dropped… 41%.
I agree that Musk is hurting Tesla, primarily by destroying the car as a Liberal lifestyle brand. My estimate before was that he’s responsible for maybe 10-20% of the stock drop, and that’s not nothing. But Tesla would still be hurting along with other EV makers had Musk never bought Twitter - just not quite as much.
Another factor may be that Tesla is no longer getting the EV subsidies that newer EV vehicles are getting. That put them at a serious disadvantage.
…an update on the state of Twitter at the moment: I’m not sure how long its got, but there has been a significant escalation in bugs and usability over the last few days. The app is on life support. Search only sometimes work. For most of yesterday it wouldn’t open external links. I often couldn’t view user profiles, sometimes the feed wouldn’t load at all.
Poor Elon. So many people reminding him that Hitler was also person of the year.
And conservatives are whining about being ‘shadow-banned’ again, and suggesting that Elon needs to fire another 50% of the staff to fix that.
I’m not sure what shadow-banning is, but I suspect it is “all of our ideas are very popular and if we aren’t getting likes it must be because the deep-state FBI/CIA agents embedded in Twitter are not allowing it”.