Joe Scarnici / Getty Images for Best Events Looking cool!
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a rare thing in the car business: a celebrity and a leader.
- His celebrity has definitely helped fuel Tesla's rise.
- But of late it has begun to reveal some disadvantages.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention to all things Tesla for the past two weeks. Here's an update:
- Tesla reported first-quarter earnings and lost over $700 million in three months.
- CEO Elon Musk, who is supposed to be sleeping on the floor of his factory in California, flipped out on an earnings call, silencing two analysts and taking 20 minutes of questions from a YouTuber who owns less than 100 shares of Tesla stock and pitched his insights to Musk via Twitter.
- The stock tanked.
- Musk got on Twitter to attack the offending analysts as instruments of short-sellers; neither has a drastically bearish view of the stock, and both have hold ratings.
- The stock bounced back.
- Musk warned short sellers that they were in for a world of hurt.
- He then spent about $10 million of his own money - more likely obtained via loans pledged to his stake in Tesla as collateral - to buy up more Tesla shares.
- Production of Tesla's Model 3 sedan continued to languish well below Tesla's previous production targets, and the company continued to throw people at the problem with 24/7 manufacturing.
- Musk again declared that Tesla, spending a billion per quarter to run the business, but with just $2.7 billion in cash on hand, won't need to raise new funds in 2018.
- Musk jetted off from California to New York for the Metropolitan Museum's Met Gala, where he dressed like a preacher in a remake of "Casablanca" and squired his reported new girlfriend, musician and artist Grimes, who herself weathered flawed accusations from the internet that she was wearing a Tesla-logo choker.
- Musk took to Twitter to quash the Tesla choker rumors.
Whew! That was a lot of action for a fortnight!
Meanwhile, Tesla presumably spent many more millions to expand its production of vehicles in the low five figures. For contrast, General Motors built something on the order of 30,000 Chevy Silverado pickup trucks alone. CEO Mary Barra did not yell at analysts, attack short sellers, lose any money, announce any plans to buy GM stock, tweeted about GM's educational efforts, and didn't dress up as anything.
Maybe it isn't such a great idea to have a global celebrity as a CEO. Here's why:
Get the latest Tesla stock price here.