Elon Musk to investors: ‘Please sell our stock.’ And they did.

Investors seemed to take another big quarterly loss from Tesla in stride. At least, until Elon Musk started talking.

The chief executive’s contentious conference call with analysts after Tesla’s earnings announcement on Wednesday sent shares of the electric-car maker sharply lower. And the losses extended into Thursday’s trading session.

Tesla’s stock price fell more than 8 percent in morning trading Thursday, after Musk butted heads with analysts on the call who wanted updates on the company’s continuing production issues and high cash-burn rate. At one point Musk even told one analyst: “We have no interest in satisfying the desires of day traders. I couldn’t care less. Please sell our stock and don’t buy it.”

Shareholders were listening. The stock selloff gained pace after the conference call began at 5:30 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday. And volume surged as the stock fell after the open of trading Thursday.

Over the last five years, Tesla has at times been one of the hottest stocks in the market and was widely owned by both individual investors and technology enthusiasts, as well as institutional investors excited about the longterm business prospects for the company.

Since 2013, its shares are up more than 700 percent, dwarfing the gain of more than 80 percent for the broader Standard & Poor’s 500stock index. But since peaking in September 2017, the shares have slumped by more than 20 percent.