Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.
Tesla investors are getting antsy about CEO Elon Musk and the rest of the board being “missing in action”—the words of shareholder Leo KoGuan—at a crucial time for the automaker. The share price has almost halved this year. Demand in China is softening. In the U.S., Tesla’s share of the growing electric vehicle market is falling; it was 79% in 2020, 65% in the third quarter of this year, and S&P reckons it will be less than 20% by 2025. But Musk is very much preoccupied with Twitter.
There, Musk is dealing with other crises. Some are pre-existing conditions, such as the fact that Twitter hasn’t turned a profit in three years, but Musk himself lit many of the fires he is now fighting. He wouldn’t need to be offering advertisers major financial incentives to come back if he hadn’t first scared them off by amplifying conspiracy theories, empowering impersonators with a half-baked user verification scheme, and presiding over a sharp rise in hate speech on the service. Musk’s gross overpayment for Twitter saddled the company with $13 billion in high-interest debt that his bankers are struggling to sell.
