Elon Musk may have to sell billions in Tesla stock to rescue X

I believe the appropriate thing to say to Elon here is, "go fuck yourself."

Let me be very clear 👌go fuck yourself 👌
- 👎 𝓰ℴ 𝒻𝓾𝒸𝓴 𝔂ℴ𝓾𝓇𝓼ℯ𝓵𝒻, 𝓮𝓁𝓸𝓃 🖕
Interesting 🤔
I nominate Steven Ogg for the task.
- Too slow, gotta use Smokin' Joe
💩

Free market capitalism will say to let it fail.

If he sells enough Tesla stock, he may save both companies!

Under rated comment
- Except I’m not sure what he is planning will save Twitter

I have to give Musk credit. At least he help narrow my car buying decision to know at least one brand that I'll never buy.

There are many reasons to avoid Tesla, regardless of Musk. The complete lack of independent repair was my deal breaker, but you'll find your own. Their competition is looking pretty good these days, too.
He also removed an option for home battery storage solutions for me.
- I was talking with a solar company about a solar install with battery storage last year, and they only offered the Powerwall as an option. I literally laughed at them and said there was no way I was tying an enormously expensive piece of home infrastructure to Tesla, because they couldn’t guarantee it’d keep working if Tesla decided to shift direction.
Super Helpful!

Let that sink in.

- What an unfunny dipshit. He actually thought that was clever.
- Yeah, he is sinking it.

Stop buying Teslas! Many other great or better EV choices out there.

Are there? Last I'd heard other options either didn't have infrastructure to charge vehicles on long trips and / or took too long to charge.
I really haven't looked into this so please just take this as a genuine question, and if you do have suggestions on other EVs I'd be curious what they are even though I'm not really in the market for one right now.
- I've no complaints about the 2020 Ioniq. Road trips we've taken have all had more than adequate chargers, but contextually this is Vancouver Island/Lower Mainland/Gulf islands and they government definitely had a hard-on to put in as much as they could a few years ago, so finally ownership density is starting to catch up a tad now, but new chargers seem to appear all the time.
  Nothing beats just being able to charge at home though.
- Last I'd heard other options either didn't have infrastructure to charge vehicles on long trips
  Literally isn't an issue going forward. Other EVs can use Tesla chargers.
- You can still use Tesla superchargers with other cars, you just need an adapter.
- Rivians seem to be (a) popular, and (b) getting much better reviews than the Cybertruck. So if you're truck hunting, that's a good option.
  Didn't the industry recently standardize on the Tesla connector, though? Wouldn't that mean you could charge at any Tesla station?
  https://www.plugshare.com/
  https://www.electrifyamerica.com/
  https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations#/find/nearest
  These aren't Tesla specific.
Not many, unfortunately. Hopefully there will be.

That’s because it is almost exclusively tied up in his various corporate holdings that include everything from rocket builder SpaceX and brain chip company Neuralink to his latest startup, xAI.
None of these investments are easily fungible. Only Tesla is a publicly traded company. So the easiest solution at his fingertips is to liquidate a portion of his remaining 12% stake.

Let it fucking burn.

He'll probably just get tesla shareholders to gift him the money. They've shown they'll sign off on pretty much anything he asks for.

Musk: How about a multiple billion dollar pay package?
Sane people: You've already had it.
Musk: I've had one, yes. What about a second multiple billion dollar pay package?
- The thing y’all keep forgetting is that it’s mostly in stock. He has HUGE incentive to keep Tesla going successfully, because of the immediate impact of the stock price on his wealth

2 4 1 deal, how to trash 2 companies at once. Good job space karen!

"A recent decision to sue them for heeding his own advice to not buy ads on the platform hasn’t helped."

Gotta love it. He told advertisers to fuck off, they fucked off, now he's even more mad at them.

I really wanna spite my face... maybe I'll cut off my nose...

Could he sell all of it? And then completely fuck off? br, tesla (car) owner

Who would buy it now, though? It can't have much value left. (Edit: Twitter. Not talking about Tesla, that's a whole different arc.)
- Judging by the used car online sites, it has about as much value left as any other car with similar age and kilometers. If I had to buy a car right now, I'd probably take a hard look at the alternatives. But they'd have to actually be better, I usually make car purchase decisions based on the qualities of the car.
  Although Musk is certainly trying to make such principles difficult.
  Good thing my car is new enough that I don't have to make this choice for several years. Perhaps the competition will have caught up by the time I need to get a new one.
- It's still a car company with factories in multiple countries and pretty much the best battery tech and the best charging network. If they get bought by an established car company, they keep building the model 3 and Y cars while fixing the production issues there's still a lot of value there. You just need someone in charge that doesn't spend their days shit posting.

Why is this news...

Some rich guy might do something that doesn't really change anything for anyone.

Because it will affect Tesla's share price (negatively), just like it did last time, and Fortune's job is to report on things that affect share prices.
There is also a public interest element, because Musk is currently the richest man on earth - which affords him massively undue power and influence - but he won't be if he manages to crash the Tesla stock price with a massive sell-off.
Tesla is exceedingly overvalued right now which makes it a very volatile stock. We already saw the price crater the last time he sold stock to keep Twitter afloat, and it only really recovered when he pinkie swore not to do it again.
- Tesla is exceedingly overvalued right now
  Always has been
- Not to mention that if he sells enough Tesla shares he could lose majority control of it. If that happens and enough shareholders band together they could force all the Elon sycophants off of the board of directors, then the new board could force him out as CEO.
- I understand the aversion to Musk coming out as a horrible human being, but Tesla is still pivotal to the EV industry. Or maybe we get a twisted view of reality in the US, but most EVs sold are still Teslas and teslas are arguably the cheapest, most compelling EVs available for sale.
  Legacy manufacturers have always resisted the newer technology, and when they finally invested the money, took the first opportunity to step back away from them.
  Rivian and Lucid have exciting technology and styling, and the opportunity to take the lead with compelling EV but are still too young. Neither have yet released a car that they can sell in volume. Remember all the stories of Tesla almost going bankrupt trying to scale up the model 3? They still need to get past that.
  GM seemed to have a lot of promise but took a few years off from EVs, and really flubbed the new releases, so are returning their focus to ICE vehicles
  Ford had a great strategy but too much dealer resistance and profiteering. No one is buying a car that starts off much more expensive than comparable models, has huge dealer markup, and salesmen steering yu away. They’re a good argument for Tesla’s approach of selling direct
  does vw sell any EVs in the US? Technically I guess there are Porsche and Audi EVs, for the well off.
  Toyota and Subaru compliance models aren’t even a blip
  Is Hyundai/Kia our only hope if Tesla has problems? They’re coming in strong with relatively inexpensive and compelling models, but somehow always fly under the radar. For anyone understanding the importance of the technology shift from ICE to EV, we need Tesla
Potential Tesla stock price crash aside - if he sells enough stock, the company will be less associated with him and people on the left (you know, people who actually WANT EVs and not coal rollin' pickup trucks) would be more likely to buy Teslas again. Because to be fair, they do make some damn awesome powertrains (and attach an aerodynamic smart fridge to it unfortunately, but eh, you can't have everything all at once, now can you)
Profits stolen by Musk, that do not get reinvested into Tesla, are wasted for unnecessary and or harmful labour time and infrastructure (political advertising etc). Tesla workers produced those profits and now the products of their life-time gets wasted by decision makers like Musk Tesla workers have little power over.
It could result in people that work for Tesla losing their jobs.
Twitter used to be very widely used.
Tesla, at least in the US is by far the biggest EV manufacturer
They’re both a pretty big deal and he’s well on his way to wrecking one: we hope it’s not both

Maybe if he was smart, he'd just give up on the social network and sell it off to someone else. But he's not smart, so he'll keep sinking money into it until cooler heads in the company prevail. The era of social media dominance, I'm sorry to say, is over.

He'll definitely keep it until after the election at least.
Don't be sorry, that's amazing and awesome! Social media was internets biggest mistake. It going down is great. It dragging the shit clown Musk with it is an absolute cherry on that cake
I seriously think his decision to brand it "x" was to protect the name "twitter" from his unpopularity and inevitably devaluation of the platform.
- I would agree except for two things.
  He's shown hes not that savvy.
  The X thing has long been a dream of his.
  https://www.theverge.com/23814989/elon-musk-banking-x-paypal
You're sorry to say?

“Everything app”?
Everything but successful.
- In Elmo's defense, racists, Nazis, bots, white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and feline feces are technically in the subset of "everything".
- Yes, he wanted to turn it into “we chat” for the rest of the world. How’s that going?
I was told this man was a business genius.
Was the person who told you that Elon Musk?
- Not just Elon, also people paid by Elon. And lots of people on the internet!
- He would know, he’s a genius himself!

Let both burn

The problem with Tesla really is Elon.
If he sells his majority stake, I suspect it would be a lot better.
The biggest reason against buying them is him. They also make more than cars (their powerwalls seem alright).
If X fails though, I suspect all those bigots will flood over to here (Facebook and X seem to be distracting them for now).
Let them have their nazi prison. Just make it not profitable
- Personally I'd be wary of putting a giant brick of lithium in my house, especially from a company with the questionable quality control of Tesla.
- The people who aren't buying Teslas because they hate Musk aren't gonna change their mind because he sold some stock. The company is tainted forever.
- Having worked with Tesla I can tell you not all their problems would leave with Elon, but it would certainly be a great start.
- If he sells it all, I'll buy a Tesla the next day. Until then, dinosaur bones for me. Unless an economical and very powerful aftermarket swap parts become readily available.

Whats interesting is the NRA spent billions in TV propaganda running a news channel and that venture ended up bankrupting the whole organization. It looks like musk is falling in the same trap

Why do you think he strongarmed Teslas shareholders into that big pay day? He's known this was coming, y'all. Tesla's just paying for his misadventure.

He won't. He bought the company using leverage so he wouldn't have any personal financial investment in it.

My personal theory is that he bought it to destroy it to lash out at Grimes but, honestly, who the fuck even knows.

Maybe the Saudis and Qataris will chip in some more cash to help him out.

Is there any basis to that conspiracy theory besides some grudge about the arab spring against twitter and its agitators?
- The Saudis are the second biggest shareholder of twitter, they bankrolled twitter's acquisition by Musk, and even before that they had literal spies inside twitter.
- What conspiracy theory? The Saudis and Qataris have stakes in Twitter.
  Qatar Holding, a sovereign wealth fund, is contributing $375m, while Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who had initially opposed the buyout, also confirmed he would retain his $1.9bn stake in Twitter, writing that Mr Musk would be an "excellent leader" for the site.
  https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61337622

Aww, poor rich asshole.

I don't understand how you can sue a company that doesn't want to advertise on your platform

You can sue anyone for anything. It's just a matter of how long you fight it before it gets thrown out.
- Apparently, in this case it didn't take long.
From what I understand, they're trying to (mis)use a law to the effect that companies cant all get together and boycott a competitor in order to try to drive it out of the market. If my understanding is correct then, for example, if say Ford and GM and such happened to also run electric taxi businesses, and those taxi businesses bought cars off the open market where in theory they should buy whatever they think gives them what they need at the best price, even if from another car maker, then it wouldnt be legal for them to all go and say "we make electric cars, and Tesla does too, so lets not buy anything from Tesla, regardless of how cheap or good their products are, so they lose business" (Assuming that the Teslas in question would in fact be perfectly suitable for said taxi companies needs that is). They're trying to sue an advertising industry group, claiming that they've done this kind of thing. Except the members of the group in question arent really competitors to Twitter, and in any case, the quality of advertising is thought to diminish if the ads are next to objectionable and bigoted content, since its thought to hurt the advertised company's image, so if my understanding is correct, it should be simple enough for them to argue "We're not colluding to hurt your company, your product just isnt up to our standards so we arent buying it"
I think he sued some sort of industry group, not specific companies.

Or maybe he'll just have to sell Twitter.

Or maybe Twitter's debtors can place a lien and sell it right out from under him.

Kinda curious about what if Twitter were nationalized...? Like, make it a service of the USPS or something? Force it to become accountable to its users?

The only issue with nationalizing it is that it will be probably even worse for moderation than under Elon. Private enterprises currently enjoy protection for moderation decisions. If it were nationalized any moderator action would run up against the First Amendment directly. Elon could ban Nazis (he doesn't but he could). A government controlled entity cannot.
Well they sure couldn't break it any worse than Elon did.
- Do you want your taxes to be spent on Xitter development and support?
- Trump wins and then appoints Elon to head of Twitter. That sounds worse.

Notice he isn't going to put his SpaceX shares up for sale.

I don't know much about trading stock, but I do know SpaceX is not a publicly traded company. That means his buyers for those shares are super limited, so each potential buyer would likely be super wealthy and would have more say over the company than any one individual in the horde of public buyers that would buy up the Tesla stock. Plus, him needing to divest from Tesla might actually drive Tesla stock up a little (eventually), since he won't have as much control of the company as he did before. It seems he would still be the largest shareholder after the selloff, but this would close the gap between him and the next largest shareholder. He owns over 3x more Tesla stock than the next largest shareholder.
www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052616/top-4-tesla-shareholders-tsla.asp#:~:text=Tesla%20is%20the%20world's%20most,%2C%20Vanguard%2C%20and%20State%20Street
- He's using Tesla, a publicly traded company, as a piggy bank and transfering wealth from it to the privately owned Twitter and SpaceX. This is stealing from Tesla shareholders but because they're fucking idiots they're just letting it happen instead of dumping their stock and suing.

Big if true

Looking into it
- !!

Is this why he’s kissing trump’s ass? Does he think the orange sandwich has the ability to help him if orange shit stain becomes president?

Might try to convince the Trump cult to take it off his hands

Let's all buy it from him and just set it to redirect to joinmastodon.org

Does anyone remember when musk said he’d buy twitter just so he could delete it?

I get challenged to provide a motive every single time I say this, but I've been convinced since just a few months after the purchase that the entire goal has absolutely been to destroy it. And with some of the moves he has made, I'm frankly surprised it took this long.
He continues to be hostile to most of the user base that made twitter popular, all the censorship/freezepeach stuff, how he destroyed verification, his bullying of advertisers, etc etc. I'm NOT a business genius but these seem like obvious glaringly awful business moves and they just keep coming.
- My guess is he’s playing with his toy until he gets bored with it.

Oh nooo 😂

Anyway

How close is this market manipulation?

The Venn Diagram is a circle. If billionaires were held accountable it'd be a problem for him. But it's not

why would anybody save twitter

He's so close...sell everything, buy a private island. Retire in style, never be heard from again. Bliss for him and everyone.

Rich guys and private islands... I'm sure nothing bad has ever come of that.
- They don't call the Evil Lairs for nothing ...

Womp womp

Anything short of Elon Musk distancing himself as far from Tesla as possible is breaking his fidicuary duty.

Or, or, hear me out: just close that cesspool right down to make the world a better place.

I'll give him a 1099A and two Fox Stamps for it.

I'll give him a flick to the nose and shoelaces that are tied together

If teitter went away tomorrow......wed all get on with our lives.

That’s the part of owning a business, Elon. Making numerous mistakes costs money.

Oh no think of all the journalists that will have to work instead of quoting twitter for 3 scrolls straight!

My privacy settings block Twitter embeds so reading low quality news is a nightmare. They should just quote it in the body of the article and hyperlink it instead.

Alternatively, he could sell Twitter stock.

That would require him to take Twitter public again, for the record (that may well have been your meaning, but I'm clarifying because a lot of people aren't aware of this). The odds of a second Twitter IPO doing any kind of numbers is basically zero at this point. It's been a very public trainwreck for the last year. Might as well try to sell tickets on the Titanic after the iceberg hit.
- Don't really know about the legislation wherever, but usually it's quite possible to trade part ownership in companies even if they're not publicly traded. That's what most companies in the world are like. I know I've owned unlisted stock.