Elon Musk, who like Donald Trump refuses to just go away despite the large numbers of people clamoring against him, is seeing the portion of his personal wealth wrapped up in Tesla stock — which numbers from Bloomberg indicate constitutes about one-third of his wealth — sink in value yet again.
The share price for Tesla was around $113 late Tuesday morning on the East Coast, although fluctuations outside that range were also recorded during the day’s trading. On December 27 of last year, the company’s stock price was over $364, and even on September 27 of this year, the Tesla share price settled at nearly $283. It’s lower than Tesla has seen in over two years. Since taking over the social media site Twitter, Musk has significantly damaged his public persona to many. On the platform, where he has kept himself highly visible with a management role running the company and a steady stream of personal posts, Elon frequently pushes right-wing talking points. He even replied in what were initially supportive terms to a thread on Twitter from Russian political figure Dmitry Medvedev, who shared a list of ostensibly intentionally ridiculous predictions for the new year — including civil war in the United States.
“Epic thread!!” Elon replied in a post that a running tally the site attached under his leadership indicates was viewed 16.7 million times by early the next day. He later clarified he was supposedly joking — several hours later and in a post seen by far fewer (although still a lot of) people, at least per early data. It’s not just that, though. He also recently pushed the idea of criminally prosecuting Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, which seems like an effective sign of far-right ideology.
Although Musk has faced concerns about his at least initial focus on Twitter — seemingly over his still active role as CEO of Tesla, issues affecting decisions on Tesla by those involved in the market don’t only hinge on his credibility — which at least as far as running Tesla is concerned he has also undercut with tens of billions in stock sales of his company holdings. Although overall sales of electric vehicles in China, where Tesla has a presence with consumers and in manufacturing, were up in late December compared to last year, new weekly registrations of Tesla vehicles were sinking. From December 19 through December 25, about 8,900 were newly registered in the country — tens of thousands behind new registrations of vehicles manufactured by the Chinese company BYD.
In addition, Tesla is slowing down its manufacturing. On Christmas Eve in countries observing the holiday, production at the company’s Shanghai factory was shut down. “Tesla’s Shanghai plant had already slowed output earlier in the month, with inventories building up rapidly despite a late-October price cut and substantial year-end incentives,” news on the situation from Investor’s Business Daily explained. Tesla previously said no suspension of production would be taking place.
