In today’s age of influencers, there is one figure who can possibly lay claim to being the influencer of all influencers, and that is Elon Musk.
Known for making extremely forthright decisions and taking a leading position in, well, pretty much everything he does, what often appear to be vanity projects for self-promotion end up being sound business moves which disrupt entire industry sectors and lead to massive returns.
A case in point is last year’s almost unbelievable scenario in which a tweet put out by Elon Musk crashed the value of five popular cryptocurrencies by almost $1 trillion, and instead of scaring people off in their droves, a large number of conservative, analytical investors bought in, and then a few weeks later a subsequent tweet by Elon Musk caused the values to rise again.
This fascinating working of the media by one man has become one of his trademarks, so much so that Elon Musk has been attempting to acquire Twitter for a few months now.
Just as he appeared to have given up, his interest in buying Twitter has resurfaced, and once again he is dumping shares in Tesla to be able to fund the purchase of it.
Back in April 14 this year, Elon Musk made his initial offer to purchase Twitter for $43 billion, after previously acquiring 9.1% of the company’s stock for $2.64 billion. To do this, he leveraged some of his positions at Tesla and made loans, however the deal fell through.
Now it appears that the deal is back on the table and Elon Musk is back in the business of offloading Twitter stock in order to buy Twitter on the open market, a move that has been criticized by many traditional investors and wealth managers.
One comment, coming from Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives yesteday was particularly harsh. “Selling Tesla stocks to fund his Twitter takeover is like giving away caviar to buy $2 pizza” said Mr. Ives.
Tesla stock has been declining in value for a number of weeks, and yesterday’s move was no exception. The market reacted to Elon Musk’s renewed interest in Twitter with a downward move for Twitter of a further 3.4% on the US market yesterday.
Twitter stock, however, jumped up in value from 50.85 USD at the beginning of the trading session to 51.81 by lunchtime yesterday, showing that investors welcomed the news.
In keeping with Elon Musk’s gung-ho approach, there is much volatility now in both stocks and it sometimes appears as though he enjoys this sort of market pandemoneum, hence his continued appetite for causing it!
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