Latest / Elon Musk Thinking / CEO Ilon Musk! How Tesla SpaceX and Twitters Volatility.
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- 0:01Elon Musk, at three hundred and thirty billion dollars, was the richest man
- 0:06in the world. But then Tesla's stock has plummeted more than sixty five percent
- 0:12since the start of twenty twenty two. He's no longer the world's richest man,
- 0:16and his ev company is on track for having its worst year in the
- 0:20stock's history. By the end of twenty twenty two, Musk lost more than
- 0:25half his net worth. On paper, on any given day, he could
- 0:29be the world's richest man, or he could be the world's second richest man.
- 0:32Or you know, he might fall because the share value of Tesla falls.
- 0:36Most of Musk's wealth is tied up in shares of his businesses. That
- 0:40means volatility in his company's stock and valuations can directly sway his net worth.
- 0:47In the last few months, Musk has recovered some lost ground. His net
- 0:51worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, is now estimated at about one
- 0:56hundred and sixty billion dollars, but the trajectory of his key businesses has some
- 1:00investors concerned. Here's how a volatile stretch for some of his companies is impacting
- 1:07Musk's net worth. Elon Musk's wealth really balloon during the pandemic, but in
- 1:12the past year so we've seen it go on a kind of a wild roller
- 1:17coaster. The Wall Street Journal reached out to Elon Musk for common but he
- 1:21did not respond. Since he took over Twitter roughly six months ago, there's
- 1:25been lots of questions about his overall management style and wondering if perhaps some of
- 1:30the magic has been rubbed off. Musk is a serial entrepreneur. He made
- 1:36twenty two million dollars selling his first startup in nineteen ninety nine, an internet
- 1:41business called zip two, then bent most of that money on a startup PayPal.
- 1:46When eBay bought PayPal, he made one hundred and sixty five million dollars
- 1:51and used that to found SpaceX and become an early investor in Tesla. He
- 1:56bought Twitter in October twenty twenty two for forty four billion dollars, funding some
- 2:01of the purchase by selling thirty nine billion dollars worth of his test last shares.
- 2:07It's been a rocky a few months since its takeover. Twitter has never
- 2:09been a company that's made a lot of money, oftentimes being unprofitable on an
- 2:14annual basis. But he takes control and immediately he says he needed to start
- 2:21making dramatic changes. Soon after the purchase, Musk fired top executives, laid
- 2:25off thousands of employees, and said advertisers cutting ad spending had led to a
- 2:30massive drop in revenue. He thinks, he's, in essence rights sized the
- 2:35ship, but now it's a private company, so we don't know exactly what's
- 2:38going on in there. Musk's ambitions for Twitter are a mix of content,
- 2:43communication, and commerce, similar to popular Chinese social media platform we Chat.
- 2:49All this, Musk says, will help turn Twitter into a company worth two
- 2:53hundred and fifty billion dollars. But for now, Twitter is valued around twenty
- 2:58billion, and I remember, twenty billion dollars is dramatically less than what he
- 3:01acquired the company for the deal that was around forty four billion dollars. So
- 3:07just imagine his wealth going like this, and it's just been a wild ride
- 3:12to watch Elon. Musk's main source of wealth is Tesla. As of late
- 3:16April twenty twenty three, Tesla was worth about five hundred billion dollars and Musk
- 3:23owns about thirteen percent of a company. Tesla grew significantly in twenty twenty up
- 3:28to a peak value of one point two trillion dollars in twenty twenty one,
- 3:31but it fell significantly last year, down to a round three hundred and ninety
- 3:37billion, and all that fluctuation has affected Musk's personal wealth. While Tesla's stock
- 3:43has rebounded slightly in twenty twenty three, investors have a few concerns the amount
- 3:47of time Musk spends focused on Twitter and Tesla's price cuts that have reduced profit
- 3:53margins on each car itselfs well, Tesla is profitable and it's projecting a dramatic
- 3:58growth into the future. The question is how dramatic and how profitable. Musk
- 4:03also envisions a future where Tesla's continue making money for the company after someone initially
- 4:10purchases the car, for example, charging for software updates, and that's a
- 4:14big bets in a lot of ways, an industry upending business model. Tesla
- 4:19has not yet shown the ability to deploy fully autonomous vehicle technology, and so
- 4:26he's essentially telling the world this is coming and we're going to make a lot
- 4:30of money down the road. In Wall Street's not so sure about that.
- 4:34And then there's SpaceX. Musk founded the company in two thousand and two with
- 4:40money he got from selling his stake in PayPal, and while SpaceX doesn't release
- 4:45financials, last year, the company was valued at a round one hundred and
- 4:48forty billion dollars. As of twenty twenty two, a trust associated with Elon
- 4:54Musk owned forty two percent of the company. SpaceX executives recently said it's making
- 5:00money off of its Falcon nine rockets and Dragon spacecraft, and executives expect Starlink
- 5:05SpaceX division that provides high speed broadband internet with satellites, to begin making money
- 5:11this year too. Tesla is where the bulk of his wealth is at this
- 5:15point, but SpaceX is increasingly looking like it's going to be a juggernaut onto
- 5:20its own and might be where the next kind of tranche of huge valuation comes
- 5:27from. Musk also owns three other companies, Neuralink, Boring Company, and
- 5:32x Ai. They're all privately held and their finances are unclear the other early
- 5:39stages, you know, the bulk of elong Musk's time at this point is
- 5:44in three places, Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter. These other startups
- 5:49are of interest to him, but he would even say that they are far
- 5:55down on the list of priorities in any given day. Musk's wealth has traditionally
- 6:00been tied up in his businesses, and he's been labeled as a cash poor
- 6:03billionaire because he has to borrow against his shares for living expenses. One of
- 6:09the things about Elon is he's become richer and richer is that it gives him
- 6:14the whereworthal and the ability to chase these kind of big ideas that he has,
- 6:18whether it's trying to make a humanity a multiplanetary species, or make electric
- 6:25cars cool, or by that shiny object that he now has, which is
- 6:30Twitter. A stumble now could kind of change his legacy, could perhaps overshadow
- 6:35his past accomplishments. Yet he's still showing a huge appetite for risk.