Longtime Tesla Investor: Tesla Needs To Either Get A 'Real CEO' Or Ask Elon To 'Come Back To Work'!
Longtime Tesla investor Ross Gerber said on Thursday that in order to rescue Tesla's plunging stock price, CEO Elon Musk either needs to change his behavior or be replaced.
He said, This could turn around very quickly if either Tesla gets a real CEO who's actually going to help the company, or Elon changes his tune and actually comes back to working at Tesla and promoting the brand in a positive way.
Following Wednesday's 4.54% decline, Tesla's stock fell another 4.12% on Thursday, closing at $162.50 and down about 36% for the year to date.
Previously, Wells Fargo lowered their target price for the company to $125 per share, describing Tesla as a growth company with no growth, and predicting that this year's earnings per share will be 32% lower than expected.
For investors like Gerber, disappointment in Musk's leadership capabilities and public behavior has hit its peak. This issue has been a point of contention ever since the CEO purchased X.
Gerber has often pointed out that, in the past, Musk's popular tweets about Tesla effectively saved the company marketing money, but his behavior on social media platforms has increasingly become a source of , causing damage to the automaker.
In an interview on Thursday, he said, I think investors have had enough, and we see the fallacy in this business model now, where the king of advertising the brand is now the devil of advertising the brand, basically.
Since the end of 2022, Tesla has announced several price cuts to stimulate demand, sparking an international price war. In mid-October last year, Musk first warned of slowing demand: Compared to the first half of 2023, Tesla's car sales only grew by 3% in the second half of the year, while vehicle prices fell by 5%.
Data compiled by the media also confirmed this, with Tesla's year-on-year growth rate for vehicle revenue in the third and fourth quarters of last year being 5.0% and 1.2% respectively. This was the first time it had fallen to single digits since the third quarter of 2020, and during this time the lowest growth rate had always been at least 18.4%.
Notably, since the beginning of the year, Tesla's market value has evaporated by more than $245 billion, dropping out of the top ten in the S&P 500 index by total market value.