Will the real Elon Musk please stand up?
On the one hand, he has started to make more reassuring noises lately, now that he has secured the takeover of Twitter. At the Baron Investment Conference on Monday, he backed off his seeming pledge to weaken moderation of content, saying that hate speech has no place on the social network. And he justified his proposed new $8 per month fee as a way to minimize troll activity on Twitter.
But on the other hand, he just canned half of Twitter’s workforce, saying the step was needed to save money—thus raising doubts that content screening will be adequate. Further, he tweeted last Friday that he’d start a “thermonuclear name & shame campaign” against brands that had paused their advertising on the platform. And then there’s the question of former President Donald Trump’s being allowed to return to Twitter. Musk said it would take weeks to figure out the parameters of restoring banned accounts, which seemed to say Trump would still be permitted back.
But like rapper Eminem’s evil alter-ego in the song “The Real Slim Shady,” who never suffers any ill effects from his deeds, Musk has run into some negative consequences. Namely a decline of $87 billion of his net worth this year, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Much of that coincides with his on-again-off-again quest for Twitter.
His best-known holding, electric vehicle maker Tesla, is down 43% since April 14, when he announced his campaign for Twitter. For the entire year, the drop is about the same. That is worse than the S&P 500, off 19.6% this year and 12.7% since April 14.
Tesla is sometimes equated with technology companies. Yet the falls of Big Tech stars this year are far less than the carmaker’s descent: Microsoft has lost 22%, Alphabet 28% and Apple 9%. Their dips since April are about the same as the year-to-date numbers.
Musk can take one solace: He still is the richest person on the planet, by Bloomberg’s estimate, at $179 billion.