Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk presents a new four-wheel drive version of the Model S car in Hawthorne, California, on October 9, 2014.
Lucy Nicholson | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to support GameStop’s epic rise on Tuesday, tweeting a link to the Reddit board that widely publicized the shares.
GameStop’s stock, which rose 92.7% on Tuesday, rose more than 60% after hours after Musk’s tweet, linked to Reddit’s “wallstreetbets” chat room, which has more than 2 million subscribers. Tesla’s CEO tweeted “Gamestonk !!”
The stock soared earlier in the day after Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya said in a tweet that he bought call options from GameStop, betting that the stock would rise.
Musk’s calls to certain companies have influenced stock prices before. The previous Tuesday, he tweeted about a hand-knitted wool hat he bought for his dog at Etsy. This caused the company’s shares to rise by up to 8% in the pre-market, although it ended up falling by 2.1%.
The CEO faced problems with the SEC for tweeting about Tesla’s shares. In August 2018, he said he wanted to make Tesla private for $ 420 a share and had secured funding for it. Musk and Tesla had to pay the SEC a $ 20 million fine each to resolve the lawsuit, and Musk has since agreed to submit his public statements about Tesla’s finances and other topics for his attorney’s assessment. He infamously tweeted last year that Tesla’s shares were “too high”, sending even higher shares a week later.
– Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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