Tesla Inc (Nasdaq: TSLA) stock continued to drop today as its CEO’s surprisingly candid series of tweets about his stressful life and his mental health continued to reverberate on Wall Street.
TSLA stock fell 3.5 percent Monday and was down another percentage point today.
Tesla is led by founder and CEO Elon Musk, a visionary genius and entrepreneurial billionaire who is often compared to “Iron Man” superhero protagonist Tony Stark. He founded Tesla, which is now the largest auto company in the U.S. by market value; he is CEO of space travel company SpaceX, which hopes to commercialize space travel, and he is the brains behind the tube travel transportation proposal known as Hyperloop that would hurtle passengers underground from New York to Washington in less than 30 minutes.
He is also founder of nonprofit artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, founder of The Boring Company for advanced transportation tunneling and founder of Neuralink for developing brain-computer interface technology.
On Twitter on Sunday, Musk confessed to feeling pressure. “The reality is great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress,” he wrote in a tweet. “Don’t think people want to hear about the last two.”
A follower then asked if Musk is bipolar, to which he replied “Yeah.”
[See: 10 Ways to Invest in Driverless Cars.]
“Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for,” Musk wrote. “If you buy a ticket to hell, it isn’t fair to blame hell …”
It’s not the first time Musk’s words impacted TSLA stock. In July, Musk told the National Governors Association that Tesla’s “stock price is higher than we have the right to deserve.” That sent shares down 2.5 percent and cost his company $1.3 billion in market capitalization.
Then on Monday, Tesla dropped 3.5 percent after Musk warned that the electric carmaker would face “manufacturing hell” as it ramps up production of its new mass-market Model 3 sedan. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said Musk “sounds increasingly squeamish about the production ramp” for the Model 3.
Tesla delivered its first 30 Model 3s on Friday and is set to report second quarter earnings on Tuesday after the market close. Consensus Wall Street forecasts are calling for Tesla to report a per-share earnings loss of $1.81 on $2.6 billion in revenue on Tuesday.
However, given Tesla’s generous market valuation, investors will also be watching other key metrics as well. Automotive gross margin was 27.8 percent in the first quarter. Tesla previously guided for automotive gross margin to dip to 25.3 percent in the second quarter.
[See: 5 Automakers to Rev Up a Long-Term Investor’s Portfolio.]
Tesla has also called for capital expenditures to jump from $553 million in the first quarter to around $1.4 billion in the second quarter.
Perhaps most importantly, investors will be looking for updates to Tesla’s aggressive Model 3 production targets. Musk previously said he expects to deliver 100 vehicles in August, 1,500 in September and 20,000 per month by December.
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Tesla Inc (TSLA) Investors Mull Musk’s Cryptic Tweets Ahead of Earnings originally appeared on usnews.com
