Elon Musk Is Making A Power Play At Tesla…. Why?
Elon Musk owns 13% of Tesla’s stock. But apparently that’s not good enough for him as now he wants 25%. And unless he gets that 25%, he’ll take AI and robotics development outside of Tesla. Here’s the Tweets that brought this to light:
What’s the deal here? Well, Elon loves to play both sides of the AI fence. On one hand he is anti AI as he has said that AI poses an existential threat to humanity as far back as 2018. He’s also been critical of OpenAI (a company that he co-founded by the way). But he’s also claimed that Tesla has been working on AI and he claims that tech will blow the doors off of anything else. I’m mentioning this because I think that AI is acting as a smokescreen for Elon to simply get more control of Tesla. Why does he want more control of Tesla? I don’t know for sure, but the cynic in me says that he’s looking to make up for the fact that he’s sold Tesla shares to buy Twitter as that stock sale had him go from having 22% of Tesla stock to the 13% that he now has. Regardless, I think he has larger issues when it comes to Tesla. Tesla stock has lost nearly $100 billion in market cap since the start of this year. So maybe he needs to focus on that rather than accumulating more Tesla shares.
January 17, 2024 at 4:32 am
IMO it’s because he borrowed a ton of money to buy twitter using his remaining Tesla shares as collateral.
There’s probably a clause in the loan, if Tesla stock drops below a certain threshold for a period of time (over 1yr at least?) then he has to liquidate his shares to cover the difference or use other sources of funding.
I’m pretty sure current tesla stock price is below that threshold and he’s running out of options to prop it up as price drops have diminishing returns.
If he doesn’t get the 25% he wants then he’ll start another company focused on Ai that he can then IPO and use those shares to cover his twitter loans.