Musk highlights hype’s power over markets
The Tesla owner and Spacex founder might be the richest person to ever have walked the earth, but Musk embodies why that’s no good thing.
I write regularly about the peaks and troughs in cryptocurrency prices, so am no stranger to explaining why the price of a digital currency has dropped significantly – or why a cryptocurrency created as a joke is suddenly booming in value.
But the frequency with which I find myself explaining how one man’s bizarre tweets, Twitter polls and meme-based decision making can be responsible for huge drops in a supposedly decentralised market, set apart from traditional financial hierarchy, is baffling.
Elon Musk recently reinforced his status as the world’s richest person with a $26 billion addition to his roughly $300bn net worth in a single day in early November. His electric vehicle (EV) company, Tesla, hit a landmark $1 trillion valuation that day.
But less than a week after setting out how a hefty order of Tesla Model 3s from car rental giant Hertz had sent Tesla’s share price soaring to $1,243.49 a share, I was explaining that Tesla’s stock had plummeted 11 per cent overnight.
Musk was, of course, asking his 64 million followers to vote on whether he should sell 10 per cent of his Tesla shares to pay taxes through a Twitter poll – of which 58 per cent voted in favour.
The conclusion drawn by commentators from the mass sell-off sparked by Musk’s Twitter poll was that it was likely a way of lowering the crushingly high valuation for a company still plagued by delays to vehicle rollouts, chip shortages and increasing scrutiny from regulators over its autopilot and “Full Self Driving” software.
These realities are obscured by the memeified, chill vibe presented by Musk of himself and his companies – proclaimed as a futuristic, fun and cutting edge investment.
Musk has shown that by adopting the air of a Wallstreetbets-obsessed humble genius in today’s tech landscape, you can get away with anything – even making people forget you’re the wealthiest man on earth.