For Elon Musk, Tesla Investors Vote With Their Tweets
Why did the CEO poll Twitter on selling his shares? Does he want a reason to get cash to pay taxes — or is he just bored?
What’s he up to?
Photographer: Patrick Pleul - Pool/Getty ImagesWho needs a metaverse when you have Elon Musk’s Twitter feed? In the latest installment, the bad boy billionaire conducted a poll via Tesla Inc.’s ersatz communications department, asking real people on the Internet whether he should sell roughly $20 billion worth of his shares in the company. The majority verdict: Yes. So there you have it. The masses have spoken.
Even in this market, the concept that the chief executive would offload that much exposure seems to have registered in the collective brain’s fear pit. Tesla fell by the equivalent of about $78 billion in early trading Monday, or roughly a Ford Motor Co. (it had recovered roughly half of that as of writing this). The official line — meaning, stuff Musk tweeted — suggested he had put together this exercise in bot democracy as a high-dudgeon response to calls for higher taxes on very, very rich persons such as himself.