Conflicts of interest with activist groups, advertisers and employees, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter spread to Tesla, and its market value shrunk by 2.9 trillion yuan

Image source: Visual China

Musk paid dearly for Twitter.

As of Friday’s close, Tesla was at $207.47, down 38% from the $332.67 closing price on April 25 when Musk first announced his agreement to buy Twitter. Within a few months, Tesla’s market value has shrunk by about $400 billion (about 2.9 trillion yuan).

“ This bird is free.” On October 28, local time, Musk tweeted this message, which means that Twitter has been in his pocket.

A day earlier, Musk-controlled company X Holdings II and Twitter completed the merger. It acquired Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, for a total transaction price of $44 billion, the same as the original price of the acquisition agreement announced in April. Musk announced at one point in the middle that he would abandon the acquisition of Twitter.

After the acquisition, Musk made a drastic layoff of Twitter, with a proposed layoff of 50%. “When the company is losing more than $4 million a day, there is no choice,” Musk said. “Everyone who leaves gets three months of severance, which is 50% higher than required by law.”

On November 4 , according to Bloomberg News, on the 3rd local time, some Twitter employees have filed a class action lawsuit in San Francisco federal court against Twitter.

Some companies plan to suspend paid advertising on Twitter, including Oreo maker Mondelez, Haagen-Dazs maker General Mills, and automakers such as Volkswagen and GM.

Musk tweeted on the 4th: “Twitter’s revenue has dropped significantly due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though there has been no change in content moderation, and we have done everything we can to appease them.”

In China, Tesla closed its first store to enter the Chinese market, the Parkview Green Experience Center, about two weeks ago.

In September , foreign media reported that Tesla is re-evaluating its sales methods in the Chinese market, considering closing some shopping mall showrooms in cities such as Beijing, and will pay more attention to lower-cost suburban stores that can provide maintenance services. Tesla responded that domestic sales channels are still in a normal expansion rhythm.

Tesla has closed stores in commercial districts with expensive rents in the United States in 2021, moved stores to more remote but lower rent areas, and established Tesla centers with functions such as display, sales and after-sales service.

Tesla released its third quarterly report on October 20, with quarterly revenue of $21.454 billion and quarterly deliveries of more than 343,000 vehicles, both figures below Wall Street expectations. There are voices in the industry questioning that the demand for Tesla electric vehicles is weakening.

On October 24, Tesla lowered the prices of its main models, Model 3 and Model Y, by a range of 14,000 yuan to 37,000 yuan, and the Model Y long-range version, which had the largest reduction, dropped by nearly 10%.

Tesla delivered a total of 908,000 vehicles in the first three quarters of this year, nearly half a million vehicles away from its annual target of 1.4 million. In October, Tesla China delivered a total of 71,704 vehicles, down 14% from the previous month.