Elon Musk loses $50 BILLION as Tesla shares slide 12% after CEO’s Twitter poll

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Elon Musk has lost $50 billion this week after shares of his company Tesla Inc. plunged for a second straight day on Tuesday, marking the company’s biggest two-day loss in the history of the stock after the CEO polled Twitter to ask if he should sell off some of his stake. 

The steep loss comes as it’s revealed that his brother, Kimbal, sold $109 million worth of shares in his 15% stake just one day before Elon surveyed the internet. Tesla closed Tuesday at $1,023.50 a share and opened Wednesday at about $1,010.

Musk, 50, poised a question to his horde of 63.1 million Twitter followers on Saturday asking if he should sell 10 percent of his $250 billion stake in the company to pay President Joe Biden‘s proposed ‘billionaire’s tax’ – a controversial new tax that would affect approximately 700 of America’s wealthiest citizens. 

Five days later, Musk still hasn’t indicated whether he will abide by the results or if he’s sold his 10% stake. 

The day prior, Kimbal, 49, sold more than $100 million of his stock in the EV company, garnering a $109 million payout before shares plummeted just days later, after his older brother’s infamous tweet, according to a filing reported by Bloomberg. Had he kept the 88,500 shares, he would have lost about $17.5 million between Friday the market close on Tuesday.

‘Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,’ Musk tweeted on November 6. 

The exec proceeded to ask his millions of followers: ‘Do you support this?’

‘Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock,’ the South African-born mogul added in an additional tweet. 

‘I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.’ 

A slew of social media users – more than 2 million – responded to the CEO’s query with a resounding yes, with 57.9 percent of voters declaring that Musk should sell his stake in the company.

But Musk’s poll had an almost immediate adverse effect on the stock, spurring Tesla shares to fall as much as 7 percent when the market opened Monday.

Despite the poll, Musk has not yet publicly said whether or not he has sold 10% or not. DailyMail.com reached out to to Tesla for comment. 

The company’s share price continued to plummet, with shares closing at $1,023.50 on Tuesday – down a whopping 16 percent from Friday.

Following Musk’s contentious tweet, shareholders and investors took to social media to express their frustrations with the CEO, some citing losses and others accusing the exec of attempting to manipulate the market. 

Twitter user William Carder posted that he lost ‘well over’ $10,000 as of Tuesday. 

Another commentator questioned Musk’s motives with the weekend poll, accusing the magnate of ‘stock manipulation.’

‘How is this not considered stock manipulation,’ the Twitter user wrote Tuesday afternoon.

‘Mr. Musk knew that people would overwhelmingly choose “Yes” to his question. This helps him in multiple ways. If he sells he has a lower realized gain, if for some absurd reason the government taxes unrealized gains he also wins.’

Another questioned the legality of what the CEO did, considering his prominent position at the head of the world’s most popular electric vehicle company.

‘I am not sure what Elon did is 100% lawful even through he is selling his own TESLA stocks. He is controlling the company, so it doesn’t sound right his selling was decided by people on Twitter instead of actual shareholders.’

Yet another poster, who identified himself as a Tesla stockholder, pleaded with Musk to be conscientious with what he posts on social media.

‘Can you please not make these kind of tweets that will rank your (and mine) Tesla stock. Your words carry a lot of weight. Selling that large a position puts huge downward pressure on a stock. ‘

The user added that if Musk indeed wants to sell, he should ‘do it discreetly over time to benefit yourself and your investors.’

The day after Musk’s tweet, one observer predicted that the post would cause Tesla’s stock to crash, and pointed out that voters in the poll may have been trying to stir the pot in an attempt to ‘hurt’ the CEO and his company.

‘This will tank the stock price which will hurt a lot of people that believe in you,’ the user wrote Sunday. ‘I am quite sure most of the people on Twitter voting Yes don’t have investments in Tesla and in fact don’t even like you. It’s a great chance for them to hurt you and Tesla in my view.’ 

Someone else similarly commented the day after the tweet: ‘You do realize that Tesla stock will now tank on Monday because of this, thus ending the awesome run the stock has made the last month. Posts like this is taking money out of the pockets of the people who have believed in you and your company the most.’ 

Another added: ‘You are going to sell Tesla shares owned by people that support you or work for you in order to placate people that hate you. Makes zero sense unless this is an excuse to take some money off the table.’

Meanwhile, another peeved posted said over the weekend: ‘Before posting tweets that are guaranteed to tank the Tesla stock please consider your supporters. Some have invested everything in Tesla because they believe in you. Otherwise, your next poll could ask whether if you should retire from Tesla. That would surely destroy the stock!’  

Musk was worth about $271 billion after the losses on Tuesday – losing approximately $50 billion in the span of two days, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

The $50 billion loss marks the largest two-day fall in the history of the index, according to the outlet – while the drop from Monday to Tuesday represents the biggest loss Musk has had since second-richest man Jeff Bezos was out $36 billion after his highly publicized divorce from MacKenzie Scott in 2019.

Now, market regulators are waiting to see if Musk will follow through on his proposal. 

Musk decided to launch the poll in response to Biden’s plan to tax unsold shares of stock held by America’s wealthiest people to help pay for Democrats’ social services and climate change plan in October. The CEO predicted that the plan to tax the wealthy will eventually expand to include new levies on middle-class Americans. 

‘Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,’ Musk tweeted.

Normally, stocks are only taxed when sold, with owners paying a percentage of any profits they’ve made.

But Senate Democrats have been pushing for billionaires to pay taxes when the price of the stocks they hold goes up – even if they don’t sell any shares. Under Biden’s plan, billionaires could be taxed on ‘unrealized gains,’ which would put Musk on the hook for millions of dollars in taxes. 

Courts now have to determine whether unrealized gains are legally considered income in order to tax them under the 16th Amendment. 

The new tax could hit about 700 billionaires, but critics of the plan note that the value of assets do not always go up. In 2018, Musk reportedly paid no federal income tax. Records show he paid $68,000 in 2015 and $65,000 in 2017.

Billionaires would also pay taxes for other liquid assets such as bonds and cash – all of which can increase vastly over the years. 

Musk changed his name on Twitter Monday morning to ‘Lord Edge,’ an apparent reference to the slang-term ‘edgelord,’ which refers to someone who frequently espouses views that are considered controversial or purposefully offensive, especially on the internet.

By the afternoon, though, his name on the social media site was back to ‘Elon Musk.’ 

Musk, who also owns SpaceX and is known for his flippant tweets, had said he would ‘abide by the results of this poll.’ And this is not the first time he has issued what turned out to be a costly tweet.

In August 2018, he wrote that he was ‘considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,’ a nod to Musk’s well-known interest in marijuana. The issue was, he didn’t actually have funding secured – but the stock price soared at the time, and it was later revealed that Musk apparently wrote the tweet because he ‘thought his girlfriend would “find it funny.”‘ (He tweeted how ‘high’ the stock had gone later in 2019 when it did, in fact, hit $420 a share.)

The next month, Musk smoked weed with podcaster Joe Rogan, which prompted an internet meme explosion, two of Tesla’s top executives resigned, and the U.S. Air Force reportedly started probing the incident because it holds military contracts with SpaceX to the tune of millions. 

Not only that, but the stock’s market value tanked, the SEC fined the company $20 million and sued Musk, and the CEO stepped down as chairman of Tesla in order to avoid fraud charges.

Musk has tried to sell off much of his properties over the past two years, after he tweeted in May 2020 that he  was ‘selling almost all physical possessions’ and ‘will own no house.’

He has since been living in a home he rents worth $50,000 in Boca Chica, Texas near his SpaceX Starbase rocket manufacturing plant, and sold a total of seven properties worth a total of $114 million.

He told Rogan at the time, in a different podcast episode, that he was doing it as a way to defuse criticism of his wealth.

‘I think possessions kinda weigh you down. And they’re kind of an attack vector. People say, “Hey, billionaire, you got all this stuff.“

‘Well, now I don’t have the stuff – now what are you gonna do?” 

Investors say they will now keep an eye on any response from the regulators on Musk’s Twitter poll, especially because the regulator had ordered Tesla to vet any material public communications Musk made regarding the electric vehicle maker following his 2018 tweet.