Elon Musk’s $44 billion new toy (a little social media joint called Twitter) is making all the right-wingers happy because, apparently, anything will go in terms of “free speech.” Presumably, Lauren Boebert hasn’t had a better day than when someone gifted her a gun for the first time, and Tucker Carlson’s already making sh*t up about what this all means for him. Still, all is not far-right fun and roses. Even though the deal will almost certainly go through without a regulatory snag in the U.S., the EU sent Musk a warning about not letting moderation rules be too loose. And generally speaking, Tesla’s shareholders also aren’t too excited by the “deal” news.
Jack Dorsey might be fine with all of this, but NPR reports that, as it turns out, no one’s entirely sure where Musk will get that $44 billion, and that’s drastically affected Tesla’s market share. This week, shares of Tesla fell 12.2%, which adds up to $125 billion in lost market value (although the stock did begin to creep back up early Wednesday). Here’s how NPR sums up the money-related fears:
When Musk announced he had secured the money to finance the transaction, he said he would cover $21 billion himself, with banks helping finance the other half.
What remains unclear is how he will come up with that money — whether he will sell some of the Tesla shares he owns, borrow against them, bring in additional investors, or all three.
Beyond that wildness (buying something with astronomical ticket value and no idea how to finance it), shareholders apparently fear that Musk will grow “distracted” by Twitter (that’s fair because, already, the dude does tweet a lot). And there’s the chance that his “free speech” crusade will ruffle Chinese government feathers and affect operations at Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, where workers apparently had to sleep on the floor amid the ongoing Covid lockdowns, which have already hampered production by about 50%.
The sleeping-on-the-floor thing has nothing to do with the stock prices, but boy, Musk has made some weird sleep-related headlines lately. Even though the context is completely different, I can’t stop thinking about how Grimes recently revealed that Musk declined to replace a mattress with a giant hole. Hmm.
(Via NPR)