Mr Musk certainly had an exciting couple of days. Putting aside his cultural warrior troll shenanigans, here are the business related events.
1) Regained spot as world's richest man
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he is now at 187 billion, beating Bernard Arnault of LVMH
2) More Twitter firings
An estimated 200 people were cut, including a holdover from the pre-takeover days, Ms Esther Crawford. She was famous for being featured in a pic of her sleeping in the office. A lot of the product team members were fired along with Ms Crawford.
More important, he told remaining employees that they stand to receive stock compensation.
Although given how untrustworthy Elon Musk is, who knows if this will actually happen.
If it does, are the stocks worth anything? The financials of Twitter are opaque and given the rumoured advertiser exodus and heavy debt load, who knows?
Tech companies famously use stock based compensation in lieu of cash as a form of "cashless" payments to employees. As Jim Chanos noted, this is problematic for existing passive shareholders. For employees, will they be forced to take cuts in cash salary to be replaced by stock compensation?
3) Rumoured rival to OpenAI
He may be looking to start a rival to OpenAI, which he was a founder of but no longer. He has criticised OpenAI as training their AI to be "woke" (whatever that means).
4) Upset the Global Times
His post endorsing suspicions that the Covid virus originated in Wuhan received a stern warning from the Global Times
5) New shareholder lawsuit
Lastly and most importantly for Tesla shareholders, a new proposed class action was filed in San Francisco federal court, accusing Tesla, Elon Musk and the CFO Zachary Kirkhorn and previous CFO Deepak Ahuja of overstating the effectiveness and safety of Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.
Given that he has escaped unscathed from previous legal actions, it will be interesting to see if he escapes again
The case is Lamontagne v Tesla Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 23-00869.
None of the above should be construed as financial or investment advice. Do your own due diligence as I will not be responsible for any loss/risk.
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