Matt Levine, Columnist

The Power of Elon Musk, the Meme-Stock Lord

Whether it’s a meme, a cryptocurrency or a slightly bankrupt rental car company, the Tesla CEO creates momentum that can't be beat.

October 25, 2021 at 6:55 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

Positivity will do you wonders.
Photographer: Patrick Pleul/AFP

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This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

The best thing a public company can do, from a corporate finance perspective, is have Elon Musk tweet something positive about it. “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” I once wrote, correctly but to my eternal chagrin. If Elon Musk tweets about you your stock will go up, your cost of capital will plummet, you can rip off a multibillion-dollar at-the-market offering and do anything you’ve ever wanted to do with your company. But you can’t control that; not even Tesla Inc. can control what Musk tweets.