“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” the embittered comedian Dave Chappelle told his audience at a show in San Francisco on Sunday, bringing the flailing technology entrepreneur Elon Musk out to join him onstage. The noise turned out to be a merciless 10-minute cascade of booing, which Musk described in a post on his personal message forum, Twitter.com, as “90 percent cheers.”
Luckily for Musk, if he gets tired of ordering the skeleton staff of Twitter to delete all the bootleg video clips that contradict his account, he can simply say they were booing someone else. Sometime yesterday or today, depending on who was keeping score, the share price of Musk’s Tesla Inc. (TSLA on the Nasdaq) fell low enough to leave Musk only the second-richest person in the world. Retroactively, Chappelle’s crowd was booing Bernard Arnault of the French luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH, the world’s actual richest person.
One week ago, at the Tuesday close of the Nasdaq, TSLA was trading for $179.82 a share. Today, after scraping as low as $156.91, it closed at $160.95. It has lost more than half its value, carrying away more than half of Musk’s net worth, since he announced he wanted to buy Twitter.
The $18.87 that a share of Tesla lost in the last seven days would have been enough to buy any of the following:
- Three Zoom trick worm bass-fishing lures.
- A synchronous timing belt.
- A 10-foot length of 5/8-inch cotton macrame rope (aqua colored).
- A 12-pack of rawhide-free dog treats (chicken, peanut butter, and milk flavors).
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