Looking back at the past year, especially the last few months, there is no other person in the world than Elon Musk who has made the headlines for various reasons. The main events started with his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, when he officially became the owner of the social media platform.
The events that followed were quite dramatic and Musk seemed to attract a lot of negative criticism for the new changes that he brought into the company and its operations. Even though he was highly criticized, Musk held his ground, as he always went towards strong criticism. At times it has felt that Musk enjoyed such battles between himself and his haters.
Even though he is being criticized for many of his new initiatives, there is also a section of people who see Musk as a genius and applaud all his new ventures and decisions. Musk is also well aware of this group and plays along with their support on public platforms.
Tesla, Inc, the American automotive company is the biggest and most profitable venture run by Elon Musk and constitutes a major portion of his huge fortune. Through his highly successful business career, Musk was able to build a huge fan base for the company and the Tesla cars do have a huge fan following – car enthusiasts who are highly impressed by the features that the innovations introduced by Tesla.
Musk strongly believes in his fans and supporters. It would be the last place he would expect criticism from and as of January 8th, Musk has been proven wrong as he received very strong criticism from one of his closest associates, Leo KoGuan.
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KoGuan is the founder and chairman of the business empire SHI International and is best known as Elon Musk fanboy.’ KoGuan claims to be the biggest Tesla investor in the world and a major share of his fortune comes from his investment in the automotive company.
As per the latest available reports, KoGuna is the third largest individual shareholder in the company followed by Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, who is the co-founder of Oracle. KoGuan expressed his disinterest in the company through a tweet in which he goes on to attain an almost revolt-like tone.
In the tweet posted, KoGuan says that he is siding with the company only because of his belief in the company and in Elon Musk. That belief was the sole reason he was ready to make the investment in the company.
KoGuan goes on to accuse Musk of killing Tesla and SH. KoGuan went as far as stating that if he would have known about this before investing, then he would never have done that.
In his tweet, KoGuan also added a few numbers which depicted the details about the initial investments that they made in Tesla. According to his tweet, Musk invested around $200mm and took out $40B. Larry Ellison invested around $1 B and KoGuan invested over $3 B. He ended the tweet by saying that he had no choice but to act and speak and also ended it with a note that said he was crying out for help.
The pivotal role behind these allegations and criticism from investors is the poor performance of Tesla in the stock market. According to the statistics of 2022, Tesla lost about 65% of its value. The value of Tesla in the market at the start of 2022 was around $1 trillion. The value has considerably fallen and it is calculated to be around $357 billion as of now. Tesla is also reported to have lost 8.2% to $113.06 over the first four trading sessions of 2023.
Elon Musk has attributed the loss in value to different reasons like the interest hike brought in by the Federal Reserve to tackle inflation and the ongoing Energy crisis in Europe but many of the shareholders of Tesla believe that the major reason for this was the acquisition of Twitter by Musk.
It is reported that Musk bought the company for $44 Billion. They argue that after Musk bought Twitter, he completely ignored Tesla and focused his works and attention on Twitter alone.
Musk is a person who is known to counter the arguments targeted towards him effectively but lately, the billionaire has been silent in different regards. But Musk came up with a very subtle but striking comeback as he posted a chart that depicted the growth of all major American automakers for the past year.
The chart included almost all major automaker companies including Tesla and other major ones like General Motors, BMW, Hyundai, Ford, Toyota, and so on. In the graph tweeted by Musk, it is clearly shown that only Tesla and General Motors were able to increase their sales in 2022 compared to their sales in 2021. All the other major companies in America were not able to surpass their 2021 sale in the past year of 2022.
As for the two companies which had a growth in sales, which were Tesla and General Motors, the percentage increase in sales of General Motors was just a 3% growth, which is a very low range compared to the 44% increase of Tesla. He posted the cart without giving much explanation and it is true that there is no need for any such explanation as the chart speaks for itself.
According to Musk, though very subtle, it is a powerful message for all those who criticized the performance of his company and all those who argued that the company did not receive the needed attention from the management.
The silence of Elon Musk is speculated due to the publication that is supposed to take place on January 25, 2023. The company is expected to post its reports of financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 3, 2022, on January 26, Wednesday after the market closes.
The company is also set to hold a live question-and-answer webcast on the same day in which discussions regarding the financial and business result and outlook of the company will take place.
