The stock price of Tesla has plummeted by 50 per cent since Elon Musk‘s controversial bid to buy Twitter was revealed.
Musk offered to buy Twitter on April 14 this year, and since then the stock of Tesla – now sitting at $167.81 (£138.24) – has fallen 49 per cent, and is 58 per cent down in 2022 as a whole.
Twenty-five per cent of that fall has come since Musk officially took over at Twitter just a month ago (October 27), with Bloomberg reporting that the controversial entrepreneur has lost over $100billion (£823bn) this year.
Last month saw Musk – the world’s richest man – purchase Twitter in a huge $44billion (£38.7billion) deal. He has since faced ongoing criticism over a range of questionable decisions at the company, including the introduction of the paid Twitter Blue subscription.
Musk has laid off thousands of employees, and advertisers have begun fleeing the platform in droves. Within days of Musk’s takeover, hate speech on Twitter reportedly spiked – use of the N-word, for example, increased by nearly 500 per cent within 12 hours.
Additionally, Musk allegedly told the remaining Twitter staff recently that they must “work long hours at high intensity” or quit, with rumours of the site’s collapse following soon after.
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Controversial figures such as Donald Trump returned to Twitter following an online poll, as has Kanye West after his account was previously locked following a series of antisemitic posts.
In light of these returns, others have quit the platform, including Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who said he was “ready to depart” the platform and he called Musk’s takeover an “embarrassment”. When the musician did leave, Musk branded him a “crybaby”.