Deep Dive: The Elon Musk Twitter Takeover Saga

as we look ahead to next year, 2023 we are also looking at the top business stories of the year and one of the biggest, you know what if you've been watching our show. Elon musk's shaky pivot to twitter and its effects on Tesla, the world's leading electric vehicle maker. So we've been covering it every step of the way here on closing bell throughout the year. But as a refresher, the Tesla Ceo offering to buy twitter for $44 billion in april As part of his crusade as a self described a free speech absolutist right, so there was principle involved in this massive deal, 44 billion now in the following weeks must trying to back out of the deal, citing Twitter's inaccurate data about bots and spam accounts on the platform. It was sort of skepticism at first, but twitter then took us to court to force him to go through with the deal. And it turns out that it worked and in late october he did take over his twitter's owner and Ceo, immediately taking the struggling company private and putting in place some controversial new features, a lot of chaos going on on twitter these past few months. But the time money and effort that must poured into twitter which included selling tens of billions of dollars of a Tesla stock did rattle Tesla investors. So musk's selling some 22 billion of Tesla stock and 2021 he kept up with that frantic pace this year, beginning with eight billion in april now at that point, he promised that he wouldn't sell any more stock to help the twitter deal but that was a promise that he didn't keep selling a further seven billion in august and then four billion in november. He had to finance this massive deal. So just a few weeks ago musk selling another 3.6 billion worth of the E. V. Maker stock as we had heard that he might default on some of his loans but he's now sold more than 23 billion worth of Tesla stock just so far this year and that's not something investors want to see from a chief executive. So another thing weighing on investor confidence is musk well it turns out he's the Ceo five companies and you know, these are not small businesses, these are massive companies neuralink a brain ship company, the boring company building underground tunnels, SpaceX sending humans way past the Hubble telescope did that in 2021 Tesla of course the world's leading tv company and now twitter a private company so just running one of these companies would be a lot for anyone but five kind of seems almost impossible and just the scale of each of these businesses is so notable and so different from the next. So Tesla's issues don't start and end with musk, this company is facing some increased competition both from tv makers and legacy automakers, many of whom have shifted gears to focus on electrifying their fleets and another drawback here is Tesla has had the second most recalls of any car company this year. Behind only ford. So of course I don't have to tell you about the production issues. That's another issue. But musk is called these giga factories in Berlin and even Austin texas, giant money furnaces, those are his words all what Tesla has relied more and more on in shanghai factory, which is faced with a range of issues of course, due to strict covid policies in china. So once considered a stock that literally would go to the moon. Now faced with a disaster of epic proportions as musk's image as a shrewd manager has started to unravel. Tesla on track for its worst month, quarter and year in the company's history when public back in 2010 I covered that I. P. O. Tesla also on track to be one of the S and P five hundred's worst performing stocks of the year, surpassing meta as the worst performing stock among these big tech companies and there is the year today, the stock down a whopping 68% well Wedbush securities denies joining cheddar news recently to break down some of the major issues that investors have with musk take a listen, It was a Cinderella ride for 3-4 years for Tesla and now at the time that they're going through challenges, you don't want to pile it on the plane to be sitting there on Twitter while you're going through the store. I think that's part of the problem, perception's reality and a big part of the Tesla premium. It's the musk premium that that's what investors are paying for. And I think that's why you've seen some bloom come off the road in terms of that multiple and tesla stock, but of course, macro recession, everything else. I think that's why, right, this has really been exacerbating here. Okay, so let's take a look quickly at shares of Tesla here, that stock on the move to day down 10%.