Tesla’s stock price dropped sharply Friday, minutes after CEO Elon Musk tweeted “Tesla stock price is too high, IMO.”
Tesla’s stock had been trading at about $760 a share then, after Musk’s 11:11 am Tweet, 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.”
IMO is a well known acronym for “in my opinion.”
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.
In October 2018, Musked 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.
Musk’s tweet about the stock price probably won’t get him trouble, though, said John Coffee, a professor of corporate law at Columbia University. First of all, the tweet simply states Musk’s personal opinion about the stock price rather than anything concrete.
“Moreover, it is very rare for a CEO to admit that his stock price is too high, and such assessments should be encouraged, not punished,” Coffee said in an email.
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.”