Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
It's hard to overstate what a crucial time this is for Tesla. They had early-adopter success when they had the field to themselves. But now every major car company plus a bunch of other people (possibly including Apple) are coming for them. Pivoting to the mainstream market and fending off all the competition is going to take both dedication and gobs of capital. Capital that is going going to be harder to raise with a distracted CEO and a bunch of investors who've had their fingers burned.
And the stock in Tesla dropping directly correlates with the stock in the SV bubble economy dropping, mass layoffs, and overall economical downturn.
The latter argument is addressed in the article: "Tesla's value is down more than 52% since the Twitter buyout was approved on April 25, while the S&P 500 is only off 5.5%. And Tesla stock is off 29% since the deal closed on Oct. 27, much worse than the S&P 500's 6.6% gain in that time."
That's true, however the majority of people still purchase non EVs, which is not the market Tesla is in. As multiple parts of the world are moving to ban sales of new petrol cars (UK 2040, EU 2035, Chili 2035, Hong Kong 2035, India 2040, etc), there will be an interesting point where most new cars purchased worldwide are EVs.
I don't believe Tesla are the ones who need to catch up to the petrol manufacturer market - the opposite is true. The traditional manufacturers have about 10 years to catch up or start bleeding, as laws will force purchasers to buy an EV.
RE the value loss argument, it is certain that the overvalued Tesla stock is dropping, however that 52% is during a period that tech stocks (which I would argue Tesla is one of) have been dropping like crazy. The NASDAQ is down almost 30% from the start of the years, mostly pulled downwards by tech stocks:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fallen-faangs-nasdaq-wipeout-...
I don't think they're in a worse position than any other tech stock, especially with global legislation effectively guranteeing them a long term pay off.