Tesla’s shares fell up to 4.6% in late Friday morning trading. (File)
Does Tesla Inc. have the potential to be a $ 1 trillion company? It’s an idea that made Elon Musk tweet on Friday morning, just for the billionaire to do something quite rare for him: delete a post.
The exchange started with a tweet from an account that regularly features promotional posts about Tesla and “Full Self-Driving”, a package the company sells along with its Autopilot driver assistance system. The feature set often referred to as FSD is controversial because of Tesla’s mixed message – the company tells drivers who use it that they need to be fully attentive.
“FSD is the greatest thing ever,” wrote user @WholeMarsBlog. “Tesla will be bigger than Apple.”
I think there is a> 0% chance that Tesla will be the biggest company
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2021
Musk, Tesla’s CEO, replied that he thinks there is “a> 0% chance that Tesla will be the biggest company”. After another user wrote that he loved “the direction of that arrow”, Musk replied: “Probably in a few months”.
Musk then quickly deleted the last post. It is unclear whether he thought better of sending it or was asked to remove the tweet.
Tesla’s shares fell up to 4.6% in late Friday morning trading. The shares fell 3.7% at 12:55 pm in New York.
As part of an agreement signed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018, related to Musk’s tweets about closing the company, Tesla agreed to hire a securities attorney to review executive posts on social media and ensure that consistent with disclosure policies and procedures. Tesla also agreed to supervise Musk’s communications, specifically, and to pre-approve anything that contains informational material for the company or shareholders.
Hours before Friday’s switch, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Tesla repeatedly violated US labor law and needed to have Musk delete a tweet in which he threatened to punish workers if they unionized. He has not yet removed that post.
With a market capitalization of around $ 600 billion, Tesla has a long way to go to overtake Apple Inc. as the largest company in the world. The iPhone maker’s market value is about $ 2 trillion.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by the NDTV team and is published from a syndicated feed.)