Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Tesla, whose share price has halved, Twitter, which is mired in chaos, and space exploration company SpaceX, brain neuroscience company Neuralink and underground tunnel company Boring Company, as well as Musk, who has several companies at the same time, are struggling to balance the right and the right. In the face of the falling stock price and multitasking Musk, Tesla shareholders finally shouted "Musk dismissed."

Mr Musk was called out of class on Thursday when Indonesian billionaire KoGuan Leo, Tesla's third-largest natural person shareholder, posted several tweets publicly calling for Mr Musk to be dismissed. Liao Kai, originally a loyal follower of Musk, bought a lot of shares because he believed in Tesla's prospects, and even sold other stocks to focus on holding Tesla.

At its peak, his Tesla stake was worth more than $7 billion. As Tesla's share price continues to fall this year, Liao's investment has shrunk to $3.4 billion, but it is still Tesla's third-largest individual shareholder after Mr Musk and Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

What made the billionaire publicly ask Musk to be dismissed? Liao Kaiyuan accused Musk of putting too much energy into Twitter. "Musk abandoned Tesla. Tesla doesn't have a working CEO. Tesla needs and deserves a full-time CEO." He later added, "Musk used to be a proud father and Tesla grew up. (now Tesla) needs an executor like Cook, not Musk."

"I was already a billionaire when I invested in Tesla, and I will continue to invest in Tesla in the future, because with or without Musk, this company will become the largest enterprise," he wrote. I invested in Tesla because of Musk. I wanted him to stay on as CEO, but he abandoned Tesla. "

Obviously, the depressed performance of Tesla's share price this year and Musk's multitasking make investors very dissatisfied. Last week alone, Tesla's share price fell 16%, the worst performance in the past two years, and fell by more than 60% in the past year, from a high of $402 at the end of last year to the current $150. the market capitalization has lost more than $700 billion and is now less than $500 billion.

The sharp fall in Tesla's share price will, of course, affect Musk's personal wealth. Because Tesla's shareholding is his main asset. Musk's personal assets have shrunk from more than $100 billion over the past year to less than $170 billion, giving up his position as the richest man in the world.

Although Liao Kaiyuan still believes that Tesla's share price will rise in the future and plans to buy Tesla at a bargain, he called on Tesla's board of directors to start looking for new CEO candidates and let Musk choose his own successor. In addition, Liao Kaiyuan also called on Musk to join him in buying Tesla shares to boost the falling share price. He is obviously very dissatisfied with Musk's continued selling of Tesla shares over the past year.

As Tesla's largest shareholder and CEO, Musk is the most ruthless person to cash out of high points. Just last week, he sold and cashed out another $3.5 billion, cashing out $7.5 billion in the past two months. Musk has been selling and cashing out continuously since Tesla's share price hit a high of $402 in December last year, cashing out a total of $39 billion.

Musk did not explain his purpose of cashing out, and it is speculated that he may be used for Twitter-related funding needs. Musk began buying a large number of shares in Twitter at the end of January, forcing Twitter's board to accept a $44 billion offer at the end of April, and after a series of repeated withdrawals and litigation pressure, the deal was finally completed at the end of October at the original price.

Of the $44 billion he bought Twitter, $13 billion came from bank loans and paid $1 billion a year in interest alone. Moreover, in order to raise funds for the acquisition, Musk sold $13 billion of Tesla shares in May this year. In August, he sold another $6.9 billion of shares to raise money to complete the acquisition.

It is undeniable that there are many macro and self-factors behind the decline of Tesla's share price: the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, resulting in a sharp decline in the US stock market this year, and the US economy is facing the shadow of recession, which may affect Tesla's future sales; in addition, Tesla is also faced with supply chain and inventory problems.

But what is also unavoidable is that Musk himself is also an important reason for the sharp fall in Tesla's share price. Although Musk personally built Tesla into a global leader in electric cars, with a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion at one time, his series of operations this year disappointed Tesla investors and contributed to the sharp fall in Tesla's share price.

Now Tesla, the situation is not optimistic. Capacity utilization at the German plants in Berlin and Austin, Texas was only 20%, and Musk transferred Zhu Xiaotong, head of China, and the engineering team to Texas to boost capacity. In order to boost sales, Tesla began a price reduction promotion in China. And if the United States and the global economy fall into recession, so will the demand in the car market.

Perhaps the stock price is negatively related to Twitter. Tesla investors are more worried about Musk's multitasking than Musk's high-level cash out of Twitter. Musk has no time to pay attention to Musk. To be exact, investors are worried that Musk will devote too much energy to the huge loss-making social media after his acquisition of Twitter, and trigger all kinds of negative waves involving Tesla. Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, pointed out that Tesla investors were worried that Musk was only using Tesla as a source of funds for his Twitter plan, which was irresponsible for Tesla's financial stability.

Tesla's share price seems to have a direct negative correlation with Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Tesla's market capitalization was more than $1,000bn when Mr Musk announced his acquisition of Twitter, but now it is less than $500 billion, halving its share price. Despite the overall decline in the stock market, Tesla is also the technology giant with the lowest share price this year, falling far more than the Nasdaq and S & P stocks in the same period.

After the acquisition agreement was reached at the end of April, Mr Musk planned to abandon the acquisition because of the sharp fall in the stock market. Tesla's share price rebounded immediately after he announced his withdrawal from the deal. It seems that Tesla investors breathed a sigh of relief and re-injected confidence.

But under the pressure of a lawsuit from Twitter's board of directors, Musk was eventually forced to complete the acquisition at the original price of $44 billion. He lost a lot of money on the deal. Without the deal, Twitter's market capitalization would have fallen below $20 billion, equivalent to more than double the premium he paid. In addition, Musk has to sell and cash at the low point of Tesla's share price to raise funds for the acquisition, which is equivalent to double his loss.

After completing the acquisition, Musk personally took up the post of CEO on Twitter and couldn't wait to press ahead with his transformation plan. This is his third CEO position and runs Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter. In addition, he occasionally distracts from two startups, Neuralink, a brain nerve company, and Boring Company, an underground tunnel company. Such multitasking is unique in the history of global business.

Multiple CEO is difficult to do. Even if Musk is a master of time management, he only has 24 hours a day. Growth and decline, how much time he spent running Twitter means how much less time he has spent running Tesla.

Over the past month and a half, Mr Musk seems to have focused his energies on Twitter's massive layoffs, new features and tearing down standards for content review.

After joining Twitter, Musk spent most of his tweets related to Twitter, busy explaining the need for mass layoffs, launching new products charged for Twitter and appeasing big advertisers who stopped launching them. It also worries Tesla investors about how much time he still has to spend on Tesla with so much energy on Twitter.

Musk is also happy to show how committed he is to Twitter: staying up late with engineers to review the code. Musk used to sleep in Fremont's assembly plant to boost Tesla's production capacity, but now he shows to the outside world that he sleeps on the sofa at Twitter headquarters and even turns the conference room into a temporary dormitory.

Just last Tuesday, Musk participated in a joint broadcasting event on Twitter Spaces and talked about his plans for Twitter in front of 300000 listeners. But in the middle of joint broadcasting, Musk had to go offline ahead of time. "I have a meeting schedule for Tesla, and I'm already late." In order to participate in the joint broadcasting and convey his confidence in Twitter to the outside world, Musk has delayed Tesla's internal high-level meeting.

Promise to return and break his promise in Tesla's shareholder trial last month, one of the arguments put forward by the plaintiff's lawyer was that when Tesla's board of directors awarded Musk sky-high option compensation, it did not ask him to focus on Tesla's work. Now Musk is not focused on Tesla, so the sky-high salary is not reasonable.

The plaintiff's lawyer specifically proposed that Musk took Tesla's software engineers to Twitter to review the code, illegally misappropriating the resources of listed companies for their own private interests and harming Tesla's shareholders' rights and interests. Because Twitter is Musk's personal asset, it has nothing to do with the listed company Tesla.

Musk explained in court that the engineers volunteered to help and went to Twitter to review the code outside Tesla's working hours. But in fact, Musk misappropriated Tesla resources far more than these engineers, he called at least 17 executives from Tesla and SpaceX to Twitter to help operate, including Tesla CIO Nagesh Saldi.

In the lawsuit trial in the middle of last month, Musk said at the time that he would complete the fundamental organizational reconstruction of Twitter within a week and would soon shift his energy back to Tesla and find a new CEO for Twitter. However, more than a month later, Musk is still deeply involved in Twitter affairs, and continues to cause new controversy.

Perhaps Musk's top priority now is to reverse the operation of Twitter, plug the loss hole, let Twitter hematopoiesis repay his huge debt of as much as $13 billion as soon as possible, and avoid further selling Tesla shares to cash out the loan. This is the main reason why he devoted himself to Twitter transformation after the acquisition.

Twitter has about $5 billion in annual revenue, more than 90% of which comes from advertising, but it lost $220 million last year and another $270 million in the second quarter of this year. After Musk, anxious to stop losses, completed the acquisition, he made two consecutive layoffs on Twitter, cutting the total number of employees directly from 7500 to less than 2000.

Twitter continued to be negative, however, what Musk did not expect was that Twitter's big advertisers were strongly resistant to his entry. After his acquisition, major advertisers such as L'Or é al, Allianz and United Airlines suspended Twitter ads. IPG, the world's largest advertising agency, has even advised its clients to suspend Twitter altogether.

It is worth mentioning that Musk used Tesla employees to work on Twitter, which even triggered the dissatisfaction of GM and other big car companies. These car companies question that Tesla employees can see Twitter's background data, which means that their audience and advertising data on Twitter platform will also be grasped by competitors. After Musk took over, Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen all stopped advertising.

Twitter originally set a revenue target of $1.4 billion for the fourth quarter, down from $1.6 billion in the same period last year, but Twitter had to lower its revenue target from 1.4 billion to 1.3 billion as big advertisers continued to leave, the New York Times reported. and then to $1.1 billion. It is against this background that Twitter launched an advertising reward program at the end of last month, which is equivalent to a price reduction promotion.

In addition, after Musk entered Twitter, he completely overturned the re-establishment of Twitter content censorship standards, causing more controversy. He entered Twitter under the banner of "freedom of speech", accusing Twitter of leaning to the left in content censorship standards collectively developed by Twitter executives and promising to set up a multi-perspective content review committee to take charge of major decisions.

But in less than a month, Musk abandoned the idea of a "content review committee", disbanded Twitter's original external advisory committee, and frequently used Twitter votes as the only criterion for his personal decision-making. he has successively restored former President Trump and tens of thousands of banned right-wing accounts.

Just last week, Musk claimed that his young son was being followed in Los Angeles and suddenly adjusted the rules of the Twitter platform to prohibit the sharing of information about other people's locations. He blocked the account that records the trajectory of his private jet and the personal account of the operator through public data, as well as many of the mainstream journalists who criticized him for the incident.

Slightly ironically, just a month ago, Musk vowed that he would follow the principle of freedom of expression and would not block the private jet tracking account. Moreover, when the LAPD contacted the Musk security team to ask about the tracking incident, the Musk security team did not report any violations.

The act of arbitrarily blocking media reporters has brought great controversy to Musk. He was not only protested by the mainstream media, but even punished and warned by the European Commission. After bearing the pressure of public opinion, Musk unsealed the media reporter account in the name of voting two days later. At the same time when he was dealing with these negative storms, Tesla's share price was falling all the way.

Shareholders prefer him to return to Webbush analyst Elvis pointed out that Tesla investors are becoming more and more wary of Musk, just like the boy crying wolf. It is against this backdrop that even Tesla investors, who once supported Mr Musk's acquisition of Twitter, are losing patience.

Ross Gerber, founder of the Gerber Kawasaki fund and an important institutional shareholder of Tesla, who once supported Mr Musk's acquisition of Twitter, can no longer contain his anger. "Tesla's board should wake up. Do you have any plans? who is running Tesla now and when will Musk be back?" he wrote on Twitter last Thursday.

After learning that Musk had sold Tesla shares again to cash out, Gobo and Liao Kai had made the same request: Tesla needed to buy back shares to boost the share price that had fallen because of Musk's multitasking and high-level cash out.

But now Mr Musk clearly does not have the money to buy back shares. Over the past period of time, Musk's team has been looking for new investors and plans to sell Twitter shares at his purchase price, bringing in new money to cover the shortfall and reducing its own financial pressure.

In an interview with the media, Gobo complained about Twitter. "We were at the best stage in Tesla's history, but now everything has been ruined by Twitter. I think if Tesla announces that Musk will no longer serve as CEO, Tesla's share price will certainly rebound sharply. But I don't want that. I just want him to go back to Tesla headquarters in Austin."

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