Billionaire Elon Musk said Tesla Inc.’s (TSLA) stock is too expensive, sending the electric carmaker’s shares down as much as 13% on Friday.
“Tesla stock price is too high,” Tesla’s CEO Musk said in a Twitter post.
Shares dropped 10.3% to close at $701.32 in U.S. trading on Friday. Even after the plunge, the stock is up about 63% this year.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk responded in an email that he wasn’t joking and that his tweets weren’t vetted before he posted them. This year’s stock advance still means that Musk will be able to meet the market cap performance target he needs to receive stock options that would generate over $700 million.
The outspoken billionaire, who has 33.5 million Twitter followers, also reiterated his harsh criticism regarding U.S. stay-at-home orders which are affecting Tesla’s production levels as one of its main factories in Fremont, California remains shut.
“Now give people back their FREEDOM,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post on Friday. “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.”
The comments come after Musk on Wednesday told investors that the coronavirus-related regulations are a “key risk” to the business and said lockdown orders are “fascist”.
Ben Kallo, analyst at Robert W. Baird, who has a Hold rating on the stock sees “significant uncertainty over the next 2 to 3 quarters” when it comes to the prospect of returning to prior production levels.
“We can only guess at motivations behind his sequence of tweets,” Kallo said in a note to clients.
Like Kallo, the consensus of Wall Street analysts has a Hold rating on the stock based on 11 Sells, 10 Holds and 6 Buys. The $609.90 average price target forecasts shares will decline 13% in the next 12 months. (See Tesla’s stock analysis on TipRanks)
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