Elon Musk’s net worth has dropped below $200 billion after a long time, as Tesla’s stock saw a significant crash today. Musk had earlier in the day sold at least $3.95 billion worth of shares in his electric car company.
On Tuesday, as Tesla’s stock hit a 52-week low in early morning trading, Musk’s fortune dropped to an estimated $195.6 billion as of 10 AM, Eastern Time. It’s only the second time since October 2021, that Musk’s net worth has dipped below $200 billion. His net worth briefly dipped to $199 billion in May this year before quickly rebounding. Despite the latest drop in his net worth, Musk continues to be the richest man on earth, as per Forbes, with Bernard Arnault & family at second, with $159.3 billion, and Gautam Adani at third, with $145.8 billion.
This was the second time that Musk had sold a portion of his stake in Tesla, after acquiring Twitter. Fearing that Musk is paying a lot more attention to Twitter than he is to Tesla, shareholders, out of fear that the value of Tesla’s shares may drop further, sold their holdings in droves. This had the inverse effect of the value of Tesla’s stocks, actually falling more.
In 2022, Musk sold over $8 billion worth of stock in April and roughly $7 billion worth in August. In the same month, he addressed his fans, and his shareholders that he was done selling Tesla shares to fund a possible Twitter acquisition. He wrote, in a tweet, “In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock.”
Since closing the purchase, Musk has pulled dozens of Tesla engineers to Twitter to assist him with code review and other work at Twitter, which is another reason why shareholders may have panicked.
Musk may have anticipated the troubles that awaited him on acquiring Twitter, because of which he tried to back out of the deal he proposed. However, once he was forced to go through with the acquisition he must have realised that the problems were significantly larger than he had anticipated.
The fact that ad spends, Twitter’s main source of revenue started to dry up after he took control of Twitter also forced Musk to take some drastic steps to grow Twitter’s revenue.
There are other factors to blame as well. The ongoing Midterm Polls in the United States show that things are looking good for the Republicans, which has made investors a little worried about players who deal with clean energy, as per several analysts.
Then there is the fact that on Tuesday morning that Tesla recalled 40,000 cars over a possible steering issue.
There’s also the issue with China. China is one of the largest markets for Tesla, and also a major point of manufacturing. Given that the country is going through a phase of economic uncertainty, and a wave of covid lockdowns across major manufacturing hubs in the country.
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