BITTER AND TWEET
Tesla stock tumbles after Musk’s wild Twitter rant
Tesla shares took a dive after Elon Musk unleashed a bizarre Twitter rant on Friday morning, saying that the electric-car company’s stock price was “too high” even as he griped about the coronavirus lockdown.
“Tesla stock price is too high imo,” Tesla’s billionaire boss tweeted at 11:11 a.m. ET, sending shares in the Silicon Valley-based company down as much as 13 percent.
The surprise tweet — which came after Tesla reported its third straight profitable quarter earlier this week — was just one of several that sent investors running for the exits and left corporate-governance experts scratching their heads.
“I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,” Musk tweeted a minute before his “too high” tweet. “My gf @Grimezsz is mad at me,” he added about an hour later, referring to Claire Boucher, the pop star with whom the 48-year-old is expecting a child. “Baby due on Monday.”
Musk’s tweet on Tesla’s stock price arrived almost exactly a year to the day after he came to terms with the Securities and Exchange Commission over an agreement that would see him submit all of his tweets to Tesla’s legal department for approval before sending them out.
Under the consent decree — which came after a 2018 tweet in which he said he was thinking about taking
Tesla private at a pot-friendly $420 a share and sent the company’s stock skyrocketing — any tweet Musk sends with possible information about Tesla’s financial condition must be reviewed by a company lawyer.
“This is a clear, gross violation of the decree,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, told The Post. “His opinion is based on his expertise as the CEO. This is not his opinion on when
Major League Baseball will restart — it’s about something he directly oversees.”
Sonnenfeld said Tesla’s board should be proactively reaching out to the SEC to smooth things over, perhaps in the form of a fine, to prevent the situation from growing into a larger controversy.
“The SEC is under obligation to follow through or they have no credibility,” he said.
Eleanor Bloxham, an expert in corporate governance, agreed, calling Musk’s stock price tweet “the last straw.”
“If I sat on the board of Tesla, I would be very, very concerned,” she added. “Not only about if he’s sharing these tweets with Tesla’s legal counsel as required, but also about if he’s in a sane state of mind. The tweets lack any sense of decorum or leadership.”
Reps for Tesla and the SEC didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Tesla shares finished the day down 10 percent, at $701.32.
Musk’s online outburst continued with what looked like complaints about the coronavirus lockdown.
“Now give people back their FREEDOM,” Musk tweeted, proceeding to quote lyrics from the National Anthem in random order, among them, “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
Now give people back their FREEDOM ... O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? — tweet by Elon Musk