Culture
Elon Musk is tanking Tesla's stock live on Twitter
The CEO is currently on a tweet-tirade, calling for 'FREEDOM,' reciting patriotic lyrics, and generally going off. Is he hacked, or is this just another day for Musk?
Elon Musk's Twitter activity is once again proving to be his businesses' worst enemy. The Tesla CEO went on yet another bizarre tirade Friday morning, first writing that he would be selling all of his possessions and then stating: "Tesla stock price is too high imo."
Well, fret not, Elon, your shares are plummeting now.
It's a bit much, even for Elon — While Musk has been acting like a fool on Twitter for quite some time now, the current global crisis has somehow brought out something even worse in him. That includes tweeting dangerous misinformation about who is and isn't at risk of catching COVID-19. On his latest kick, he's joined the masses of people calling to 'liberate' the country from lockdown orders designed to curb the pandemic's spread.
In his tweetstorm on Friday, Musk demanded, 'give people back their FREEDOM,' before launching into a Twitter rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. He then shifted gears somewhat, tweeting a line from a Dylan Thomas poem made famous by its use in the movie Interstellar: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." How original.
It's all so unhinged, even for him, that a lot of people are now wondering if his account has been hacked. It's hard to tell, though, considering his strange history of oversharing on the platform.
This all comes after a slew of ill-advised remarks the CEO has made since the start of the pandemic. During an earnings call this week, he even went as far as to call the necessary safety measures 'fascist' — an interesting remark coming from a billionaire who wants to push employees back to work even when it's not safe to do so. As a symbol of his oppression, the factory owner changed his Twitter avatar to the cover art from Deus Ex, a dystopian game released 20 years ago about a lab-made virus designed to cripple civilization so a malicious power could gain total control.
Have you learned nothing? — What's most surprising about Musk's outburst today isn't the bad opinions or the lyric reciting — it's that he's blasted out information about Tesla stock again precisely a year after settling a dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which he agreed not to do... exactly that. If you recall, in 2018 the Tesla boss famously, stupidly tweeted: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."
By no surprise, he caught a ton of heat for tweeting this information and was forced to step down as Tesla chairman in addition to paying a $20 million fine.
Enough already — A reply buried in the neverending thread gives us (maybe) a hint about what's really going on. "Baby due on Monday," Musk tweeted to a well-wisher after first noting, "My gf @Grimezsz is mad at me." Who knows if that's actually true, but Musk certainly wouldn't be the first expectant father to lash out due to pre-baby panic — if that's even what's happening here.
Regardless, man, you've got a heavily-pregnant girlfriend who you've just acknowledged is angry about all of this; quit stressing her out.