Tesla Stock Tanks After Elon Musk Tweets Price Is 'Too High'
PALO ALTO (CBS SF / CNN) -- Tesla's stock price dropped sharply Friday, minutes after CEO Elon Musk tweeted "Tesla stock price is too high, IMO."
The stock of the Bay Area-based carmaker had been trading at about $760 a share then, after Musk's tweet at 8:11 a.m. Pacific Time, plummeted to below $700 a share within minutes before rebounding slightly. By midday, the stock was down 8%.
The tweet came amidst a string of tweets starting with an announcement that he was "Selling almost all my physical possessions" and "Will own no house," followed by lyrics from the US national anthem and another tweet indicating that his girlfriend, pop singer Grimes, "is mad at me."
After the stock price tweet, he then tweeted "Now give people back their FREEDOM," an apparent reference to coronavirus lockdowns that Musk has long protested.
• ALSO READ: Elon Musk Criticizes Coronavirus Stay-At-Home Orders, Calling Them 'Fascist'
In October 2018, Musk reached an agreement with the SEC that anything he tweeted that could impact the company's stock price would be reviewed before the Tweet was sent. That was after Musk had tweeted that he had a deal to take the company private which, it later turned out, he did not.
It's not the first time Musk has said that the price of his own company's stock was overvalued. "The stock price that we have is more than we have any right to deserve," he said at a London event in 2013.
In December of 2019 he Tweeted "Whoa ... the stock is so high lol."
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