The thing is that all of Musk’s enemies are imaginary. I mean, they exist, but they don’t matter. There are short sellers who think that Tesla is overvalued, and they short the stock, and they tweet about it. Musk owes them nothing and can ignore their tweets, as virtually every other public-company CEO does. There are Wall Street analysts who ask questions that Musk doesn’t like, but he can ignore their questions, and sometimes, quite rudely, does.
What matters, for a public-company CEO, is what his shareholders think. He is answerable to them. If they care only about short-term results, if they demand immediate profits at the expense of long-term sustainability, if they can be easily swayed to back an activist’s proxy fight or a hostile takeover, then maybe he should go private. All of those are ridiculous things to think about Tesla’s shareholders. The evidence for that is not only their unfailing loyalty to Musk, but also the fact that he wants to go private and bring them along. The shareholders are not the problem with being public, and there are no other problems.
Matt Levine
Just a month ago, Elon Musk was throwing insults on Twitter at a British diver who helped rescue twelve boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand; this month, his bad Twitter habits may have landed him into a legal investigation over manipulation of the stock market, and forced him to seek funding from a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, thereby giving an oil producer unwanted leverage over his company. Maybe he should just stop tweeting?
Of course, as in Trump’s case, the problem isn’t Twitter, but the man behind the tweets. Elon Musk appears to be caving under pressure in real-time. And with this SEC investigation pending, I fear the fate of Theranos may loom closer in Tesla’s future than anyone dares to believe.
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