Tesla stock crashes after Musk tweets price too high
NEW DELHI: Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk's Twitter account is rapidly turning into his shareholders' worst nightmare.
The $131-billion electric carmaker's stock dived as much as 12 per cent on Friday after the eccentric founder's Twitter handle exploded into a flood of random tweets.
It began with a statement that would be unthinkable for a CEO of any publicly listed company to utter.
"Tesla stock price is too high (in my opinion)," Musk's official handle tweeted.
And then it went on -- "Now give people back their FREEDOM"; verses from the US national anthem; and a line from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' famous work: 'Do not go gentle into that good night'.
Later tweets also claimed that Musk would be selling "almost all" physical possessions and would "own no house".
Neither Tesla nor Musk have clarified or commented on the tweets since they were posted so far.
While the tweets were random and jumped from topic to topic, the post about Tesla's stock price being overvalued had immediate monetary consequences for Tesla shareholders. The scrip was trading lower by 9 per cent on the NASDAQ as of 11 pm IST.
This is not the first time Musk's Twitter account has resulted in financial consequences for both the company he heads and its shareholders.
Tesla had got into trouble with the US Securities Exchange Commission after he tweeted in August 2018 that he would take Tesla private if stock prices hit $420 per share. The tweet resulted in the scrip soaring and breaking several upper circuits before Tesla officially said that there was no such plan in place.
The investigation by the SEC that followed resulted in an agreement between Musk and the market regulator.
Under this deal, Musk had agreed to submit any public statements -- such as tweets -- on Tesla financials and related topics for vetting by legal counsel before publication. It is unclear whether Friday's tweets were cleared as per the stipulations of the agreement.