Investors See 14% Tesla Stock Drop As "Corruption Benefit Priced Out"

Tesla's dramatic stock price decline is the result of several unique factors - Elon Musk's volatile behavior among them - but it is also a cautionary tale for any executives who lull themselves into believing that political contributions alone can create lasting value. 

A salient feature of this belief system is the expected benefit from 'relationships' which are euphemisms for quid pro quos often understood to be corrupt and, in most countries, including the US, frequently illegal. The markets' "wink and nod" in this case was exacerbated by the history of the individuals involved and by the broader expectation that the Trump administration would be largely indifferent to traditional norms of business-government interaction. That the latter has proven to be even truer than imagined does not cancel out the legacy system of laws, courts and competitive interests arrayed against perceptions of 'unfair advantage.' In effect, this was just that system waiting for an opening. In addition, the corruption benefit was not able to price out the sales, profit, brand impairment, leadership failures and other traditional measures impacting performance, so that when the benefit was removed, the other issues remained. The lesson is that financial value remains subject to a very efficient information market which is quick to respond to new developments in a complex variety of impactful indices. JL 

Jameson Dow reports in Electrek:

Tesla stock has dropped over 50 points, primarily in response to the public feud between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Donald Trump. This (has less to do) with company performance than a change in the market’s expectation of potential benefit to Tesla from government corruption. In the aftermath of the election, TSLA stock rose because of  expected benefits. It fell as tariffs, anti-EV legislation, and Tesla’s brand perception problem due to Musk’s actions became apparent. The stock price rise reflected the market’s expectation that Mr. Trump would thank Musk for his election effort by rewarding him and his companies. (But) this was unlikely to turn out the way the market thought because Republicans would continue to favor fossil fuels, and regulations were not the thing holding Tesla back. That’s a lot of priced-in expected benefit wiped away.

Tesla stock dropped over 50 points, primarily in response to a very public feud between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and convicted felon Donald Trump.

But, as we pointed out in November, this doesn’t have anything to do with company performance, and rather only reflects a change in the market’s expectation of potential benefit to Tesla from government corruption.

 

Tesla stock has had a wild few months, with big rises and falls that has had little to do with company performance (which is, perhaps, nothing new for the stock, which has always been a speculative vehicle).

Much of the movement of TSLA has been centered around CEO Elon Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump.

 

Musk very publicly supported Mr. Trump’s run for president, giving hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Mr. Trump’s campaign, despite the latter’s openly anti-EV positions (and despite that there exists a clear legal remedy stopping insurrectionists from holding office in the US).

Musk even went on to spew climate denying nonsense alongside Mr. Trump during the campaign, and later said nothing when Mr. Trump declared his intent to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, even though he previously opposed a similar move in 2017.

This led to Musk being invited into an advisory role, which was dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency despite it not being a real government department, and having a supposed mission redundant with the already-existing Government Accountability Office.

And in the immediate aftermath of the election, TSLA stock rose swiftly, purely because of expectations of corruption. But after that swift rise, it gradually fell as the reality of economy-destroying tariffs, anti-EV legislation, and Tesla’s brand perception problem due to Musk’s actions all became apparent. Despite Musk’s position as a top republican party donor, the party still seems more interested in catering to its traditional base in the fossil fuel industry.

 

Despite some recovery from that big post election rise-and-drop, TSLA took another big hit today, and it’s all due to the current rift forming between these two egomaniacs.

A rift over spending becomes something greater

During his tenure in his advisory position, Musk claims to have saved the government hundreds of billions of dollars, but independent accounting has shown that it is in fact likely to increase the deficit, not decrease it.

Nevertheless, it seems like Musk was fooled into believing his own propaganda, and into thinking that deficit reduction was ever a goal of Mr. Trump, despite that he previously oversaw the highest nominal deficit of any person in the history of the United States.

At least, he believed that until now. In the last few days, after leaving his advisory position, Musk has loudly opposed the new republican budget bill, which he now correctly points out will add trillions of dollars to the US deficit (as any lucid person might have predicted from the party of waste).

The criticism came to a head today, with Musk going through one of his patented tweetstorms, acting more like a jilted lover than a CEO in charge of a company that has many people’s retirement invested into it.

There’s been a lot of back and forth, but over the course of the day, Musk has posted many statements about how dangerous the budget bill will be for the US debt and deficit.

 

Mr. Trump responded, stating that Musk should have known these things before now, but that Musk is only acting this way because he cut the “EV mandate.”

To be clear, the bill in question does not cut any EV mandate, as there was never an EV mandate to begin with, but it does cut EV tax credits which Tesla has gained more benefit from than any other company, though Tesla lobbied in support of these cuts. The bill does not cut support for oil and gas companies, which are orders of magnitude higher than the support EV companies get.

In response to this, Musk claimed that he personally swung the election in favor of the republicans, and that Mr. Trump is showing “ingratitude” by not recognizing this fact.

Mr. Trump responded by suggesting that the government could save money by terminating all of the subsidies and contracts for services with Musk’s various companies. To this, Musk said that he would immediately decommission the Dragon capsule, which has been the main spacecraft used by NASA to service the International Space Station.

Then, Musk went on to state that a recession will happen in the second half of this year due to Mr. Trump’s position on tariffs, and also to accuse Mr. Trump of being on Jeffrey Epstein’s list (which is not the first time Musk has publicly accused someone of pedophilia, though it is the first time he’s said that about someone who he claimed to “love as much as any straight man can,” and knowingly worked alongside), and to agree with a call for his impeachment.

The market sees this as a negative sign

The public rift seems to have shaken the stock market out of its stupor, as Tesla went down more than 50 points since the start of today.

While nothing significant has changed for Tesla’s business today – it’s still suffering from falling sales in an otherwise rising market, and it still has a bad CEO – what has changed is the possibility of the company benefitting from corruption.

As I stated during TSLA’s meteoric post-election rise, the stock price was merely a reflection of the market’s expectation that Mr. Trump, a person with an enormous history of corruption, would thank Musk for his election participation by rewarding him and his companies. Nobody quite knew how that might happen, but everyone expected that it would.

 

I claimed, at the time, that this was unlikely to turn out the way the market thought it would, because the republicans would likely continue to favor fossil fuels, and that regulatory blockages were not the thing holding Tesla back from its automation goals.

Musk did attempt to use the government in corrupt ways, as detailed this week in a report by Senator Warren, and as we all remember from the White House Auto Mall infomercial (remember, folks, “everything’s computer!“).

But none of that was ever going to justify the addition of hundreds of billions of dollars to Tesla’s market cap.

The market seems to be realizing that more today, as over $100 billion has been shaved off of Tesla’s market cap since the start of the feud. That’s quite a lot of priced-in expected benefit that has been wiped away, all by a single tweetstorm.

Fight shows how vulnerable Tesla is to Musk’s whims

While it’s all well and good to see the worst two people you know fighting each other, and to finally see the inevitable fallout between two narcissists who frankly held out much longer than any reasonable person thought they would, this fight does show the significant vulnerability that Tesla has to the whims of a CEO who has shown poor ability to control his impulses in the past.

The last year or more has been highlighted by several poor business decisions by Musk, not the least of which is his support of one of the larger anti-EV entities on the planet right now.

But beyond the politics, his leadership has still been erratic for the company. Not only has he paid more attention to the many other companies he runs, when he has turned his attention to Tesla, it hasn’t been positive for the company.

After mostly ignoring Tesla for a few years, he went through a flurry of activity in the run-up to last year’s shareholder advisory vote on his compensation package. This flurry involved firing everyone including important leadership and successful teams, canceling an all-important affordable car project (and lying about it) and holding Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.

 

Now, TSLA investors have another thing to worry about – whether Musk will continue to try to “poke the bear” and get more government opposition to his company, even as he continues to make himself distasteful globally (by, for example, showing support for German neo-Nazis, agreeing with a defense of Hitler’s actions in the Holocaust, or his many other white supremacist statements). These actions have driven protests against the company, embarrassed owners and pushed many customers away – and those protesters aren’t planning on stopping.

 

While some may cheer this new rift that has formed between Musk and one of the environment’s greatest enemies, Donald Trump, it seems unlikely that Musk’s erratic behavior will be beneficial for Tesla the company in the long run.