It appears that Elon Musk's antics are not impressing potential Tesla buyers. The tech billionaire has been making his way into news headlines lately, and most of them aren't exactly positive. This has caused many Tesla customers to cancel their orders.
Richest Man No More
Musk just lost his place as the richest person in the world, and some would say that this was the side effect of his "trolling" on Twitter. There is some truth to it since some Tesla buyers have explicitly said that they are canceling their orders due to Musk's actions.
One of those said customers hated the fact that Musk attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci by saying that his pronouns were "Prosecute/Fauci." Fauci is one of the most respected immunologists, according to CNET, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Another buyer was frustrated due to the tech billionaire ordering employees to stop paying vendors after rendering their services. For most, it was generally just how Musk was acting on his own social media platform.
When these buyers called Tesla to drop their orders or leases, they expressed that it was Musk's erratic behavior that encouraged them to do so. A Tesla salesperson admitted that there have been several instances when others also canceled because of that very reason.
One of his actions that also faced backlash is reinstating previously banned accounts like Donald Trump, Ye, and Andrew Tate for the sake of freedom of speech. Contradicting the notion, he suspended the accounts of several journalists for tweeting about a sore topic for him.
Definitely Bad for Business
It's never a good thing for a business's stock price to fall, but this case is especially true for Musk. Other than the fact that Twitter still has to pay $1.2 billion in interest payments, the company has also lost major advertisers.
This was after the Twitter CEO fired more than half of his staff, including those that kept Twitter from becoming a ground for unsupervised posts. This allowed people to post derogatory tweets and publish copyrighted content which took almost an entire day before being taken down.
This issue is troubling especially since advertising accounts for around 90% of Twitter's sales. The platform is barely staying afloat, so much so that Musk has sold around $40 billion worth of Tesla shares just to keep Twitter from falling apart.
It looks like Musk will not be earning the $40 billion worth of shares back anytime soon too, seeing as Tesla's stock price is continuing to decrease in value. It was mentioned in Moguldom that the stock price has lost more than half its value.
It appears that the reality of the chaos Musk started is starting to sink in since he posted a poll on Twitter asking whether he should step down as CEO. 17.5 million accounts accounting for 57% of votes said he should.
He stated that he would respect the outcome of the vote, but that he still had a say in company matters seeing as he was the primary owner of the social media platform. There are still no reports about who would replace the now-former Twitter CEO.
