Musk, 51,’s fortune plummeted to $137 billion after Tesla shares fell in recent weeks, including an 11 percent drop on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. His net worth peaked at $340 billion on November 4, 2021, and he remained the world’s richest person until Bernard Arnault, the French tycoon behind luxury goods leader LVMH, surpassed him this month.
These trends reflect how high Musk has soared during the rise in asset prices during the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is increasingly being called the “easy money pandemic” in the Western media. Tesla surpassed a trillion-dollar market capitalization for the first time in October 2021, joining world-famous tech companies like Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., and Google parent Alphabet Inc. , although its electric cars represent only a small part of the global car market.
Now Tesla’s dominance in electric vehicles, the basis of its high valuation, experts say, is in jeopardy as competitors catch up. Under these circumstances, Musk is being forced to offer American consumers a deep discount of $7,500 to ship two of his larger-engined models before the end of the year, and is also reportedly cutting production at his Shanghai plant. . Tesla’s stock has fallen so steeply — in 2022, the shares are down 65 percent and Musk sold so many this year to cover his purchase of Twitter — that they are no longer his biggest asset, according to Bloomberg Wealth. Index. Musk’s stake in his $44.8 billion Space Exploration Technologies Corp. tops his stake in Tesla by about $44 billion. At the same time, he still has options in the amount of around $27.8 billion. According to recent documents, the businessman now owns a 42.2 percent stake in SpaceX.
Musk, for his part, dismissed concerns about Tesla’s future and repeatedly criticized the Federal Reserve on Twitter for raising interest rates at the fastest pace in a generation.
Also, as pressure mounted on Tesla, Musk was concerned about Twitter, which he bought in late October for $44 billion. He has taken a “move fast and break” approach, such as firing employees and then asking them back, and haphazardly applying content policies to justify blocking the accounts of some well-known journalists who cover him. The last high-profile decision was the order to dismiss the cleaners at the Twitter facilities and force the employees to do the cleaning themselves, because of which, according to eyewitnesses, in some offices of the corporation “there is a pungent smell to fast food.” .”
