Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk stirred fresh Twitter controversy on Friday, saying the Silicon Valley car maker’s stock was “too high,” prompting more losses for the shares and erasing the bump from a surprise quarterly profit reported earlier this week.
Tesla TSLA, -8.85% shares extended their losses after his tweets, recently down more than 10% after trading as high as $772.77 earlier in the session. The stock traded as low as $664.04.
Tesla’s market valuation was worth around $141 billion right before the first tweet; it is currently valued at $133 billion.
Musk’s Twitter thread continued with the CEO tweeting parts of the Star Spangled Banner and professing to focus on Mars rather than earthly possessions:
Musk late Wednesday shocked investors by veering off script during Tesla’s post-results conference call and railing against shutdown orders that have kept nonessential U.S. businesses, including Tesla’s main car-making factory in California, closed to help curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
Related:Tesla surprises Wall Street with first-quarter profit, stock rallies 9%
That same day, he also tweeted against the orders, adding to his controversial record of commenting on the pandemic, including criticizing the “panic” over pandemic just as deaths and COVID-19 cases started to mount in March, prompting the first shelter-in-place orders.
The regional shelter-in-place order encompassing Fremont, Calif., where the Tesla plant is located, has been extended through the end of May. Tesla’s battery factory in New York state is also temporarily closed.
Musk’s latest controversial tweets come nearly two years after his infamous “going private” tweet on August 2018, when the CEO said he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share, a substantial premium to the stock’s price at the time, and that he had “funding secured” to move with it.
That ended with Musk and Tesla reaching a settlement of fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September 2018.
Musk and Tesla agreed to settle the charges against them without admitting or denying the SEC’s allegations. The settlement included $40 million in penalties, split between the company and Musk, and the removal of Musk as chairman of the Tesla board. He remains ineligible to be at the board’s helm.
Terms of the deal also required Tesla to impose controls to oversee Musk’s social-media communications. It was unclear Friday whether such controls have been in place, and Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tesla shares have gained 202% in the past 12 months and nearly 35% in the past three months. That contrasts with a loss of nearly 10% in the past 12 months for the S&P 500 index SPX, -2.90%, which has gained 10% in the past three months.
