The past few days have been full of unhappy news for the American billionaire Elon Musk. The most prominent of these developments was Tesla’s announcement that its quarterly profits decreased by 24% in the first quarter of 2023, to be limited to $2.5 billion, despite the company’s high sales. This announcement led to a rapid decline in the share price of the company, which specializes in the manufacture of electric cars, by 11% within one day, to reach about $161.67.
The company had announced a reduction in the level of production of its cars in the United States six consecutive times during the current year, as it reduced the level of production of the “Model 3” by 11%, while reducing the volume of production of the “Model Y” by 20%. All these developments this year raised investor concerns about the company’s long-term future.
Elon Musk is the most prominent shareholder in Tesla, its CEO and product engineer. The company’s shares lost two-thirds of their value last year, due to investors’ concern about the repercussions of Musk’s involvement in his new investment in the Twitter platform, and the continuing concerns about the demand for electric cars. Contributing to this decline, Musk was forced to sell tens of millions of shares he owned in the company, to finance the Twitter purchase.
The missile explodes
The other negative news for Elon Musk came from the side of his second company, SpaceX, which specializes in space exploration technologies, aviation manufacturing, transportation and space communication. Just four minutes after the launch of the company’s new test rocket, Starship, last Thursday, the rocket exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
The “Star Ship” is the largest and most powerful experimental rocket in the world, as it is supposed to be allocated for deep space flights towards the Moon, Mars and beyond. Despite Musk and the manufacturer’s attempt to downplay the rapid missile explosion, by referring to the experimental targets of the event, it was clear that what happened was a setback in the course of developing this missile, on which the company bet heavily.
Twitter mess
On the Twitter platform, chaos has engulfed the platform’s accounts since last Friday morning, after removing the blue ticks from the accounts of thousands of celebrities, journalists, and government institutions that did not commit to paying monthly subscriptions. And many celebrities had decided not to keep this mark after imposing monthly subscriptions, following Musk’s acquisition of the platform, which prompted Musk to intervene personally during the past two days to pay the subscriptions on behalf of some celebrities. These developments raise the concern of many about the disturbances that could occur on the platform in the future, as a result of stripping the accounts of the mark that proves the actual identity of the account holders.
After all these simultaneous events, Musk lost approximately $12.6 billion of his fortune in one day. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk topped the billionaires who lost the most in the index, bringing his total wealth to $164 billion. With this figure, Musk ranks second among the world’s billionaires, after Bernard Arnault, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the French luxury goods giant “Loviton”.
