When the Circus Comes to Town

Never a dull moment. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had yet another weekend to remember on social media, taking to Twitter on Saturday to declare that corporate headcount at the electric vehicle mainstay “will increase” while salaried positions “should be fairly flat.” That comes some 24 hours after Musk reportedly told Tesla executives to prepare for layoffs equivalent to 10% of the firms near 100,000 global payroll and a freeze on further hiring, citing a “super bad feeling” over the state of the economy.

Musk’s 180 follows a stark response to that leaked communique, which may signal “looming demand deterioration” for the electric vehicle industry writ large, analysts at Deutsche Bank wrote. Tesla shares absorbed a 9.2% selloff Friday, erasing $80 billion in market capitalization and extending year-to-date losses to 22%.

Strategic whipsaws aside, Mr. Market continues to carry the torch for Musk and Co. As data compiled by AllStarCharts and Kalish Concepts show, Tesla’s $750 billion market cap is equivalent to half that of the entire energy sector. That ratio is down from a peak of 120% as the Nasdaq crested late last year, but is 10 times its pre-virus relative valuation. Tesla shares command a multiple of 6.5 times Wall Street’s consensus revenue estimate for 2023, while legacy peer Ford Motor Co. trades at six times next year’s projected net income.

Meanwhile, Musk’s quixotic quest to acquire Twitter takes another turn, as the Tesla boss today complained in a 13D filing that the social media platform is “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights” by withholding data on spam accounts and reiterated a threat to walk away from the pending $44 billion deal entirely.

That salvo comes a month after Musk announced $7.2 billion in financing commitments from outside

investors to facilitate the Twitter purchase, including $500 million in equity capital from Binance. The crypto exchange, which garnered a $4.5 billion valuation in a funding round earlier this spring, contends with its own public relations “challenges.” A report from Reuters today finds that “hackers, fraudsters and drug traffickers,” including an entity supporting North Korea’s nuclear weapons ambitions, have illegally laundered at least $2.35 billion through Binance over the last five years.