Elon Musk: Tesla's Controversial CEO Through Investing.com's Comics By Investing.com Blog

2025 investment strategy: Look for 'babies that get thrown out with the bathwater'

Happy Birthday Elon! - Now let's take a look back at the shenanigans Elon has been up to in the past year.

Today (28/06) we wish a big happy 48th birthday to the one and only Elon Musk.

What an eventful year it's been for the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) co-founder and CEO, who as of June 2019, is ranked by Forbes as the 58th richest person in the world with a reported net worth of around $18.2 billion.

Battles With SEC

Well, let's start with his constant battles with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Just like Donald Trump, Elon Musk can't get enough of Twitter, and in August 2018 he tweeted this:

The aftermath of this tweet led the SEC to accuse Musk of manipulating the market and they filed to sued him in late September for making "false and misleading" statements to investors. In order to settle the case he agreed to remove himself as Tesla chairman and was replaced by Robyn Denholm. He also had to pay a personal fine of $20 million.

Musk's itchy fingers didn't stop there however and in February he tweeted this:

This landed him in further hot water with the SEC who then asked a Federal judge to hold him in contempt - again for misleading investors when Tesla's 2019 output was expected to be considerably lower.

Although Musk’s Twitter use is supposed to be sharply monitored by Tesla, following his settlement with the SEC in 2018, his tweets still managed to provoke this response from the commission:

“While Musk claims to ‘respect the justice system,’ his deliberate indifference to compliance with this Court’s final judgment indicates otherwise.”

Oh and how could we forget this gem from back in October:

The shenanigans continued...

Musk also made headlines over the past 12 months for:

🤦‍♂️ Smoking a blunt live on the Joe Rogan podcast

🤦‍♂️ Calling Thailand soccer team cave rescuer a peadophile

🤦‍♂️ ...And just last week announcing he was deleting his Twitter account after being accused of stealing fan art.

Of course he wouldn't really leave the social media platform that he has a love-hate relationship with. I mean what would he or his loyal 27 million followers do without him?

Now, back to Tesla...

All of this controversy has of course been something of a nightmare for investors. Just look at the volatility in the chart. At the time of writing Tesla is down -32.97% compared to this time last year.

Musk through investing.com's comics!

We've been doing weekly comics for a number of years now at investing.com, each time taking a satirical look at current events which are affecting the financial markets.

For our first Tesla-related comic you need to go way back to February, 2015.

This was actually our 84th comic (we're now way over 250) and in this we took at look at the competition Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) was facing at the time from Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and the potential entry into the electric car space from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). It's clear who was, and still is, leading the way in this battle.

The next time Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) featured in our comics was in November 2015. In this edition we compared Tesla stock to Volkswagen (DE:VOWG_p). With the the electric car manufacturer's stock flying and the latter falling, largely due to a major shift in consumer habits, following a growing interest in the 'greener' car industry.

We then had to wait until October 2016 for the next time Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) made our comic. This was actually the first time we included the main man himself, Mr Elon Musk, in the cartoon. Strong Q3 earnings had inspired Tesla investors that he is indeed the right person to lead the company forward.

The most recent comic to feature Elon Musk was from March of 2019. This was linked to Elon's consistent trolling of the SEC and the direct impact his Twitter 'banter' was having on Tesla's stock price. As you can see shareholders were just as shocked as the SEC.

Is Elon Musk an unnecessary liability that Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) could simply just do without? Does he still inspire investors in the same way as he did in the past? Well only time will tell, but it's safe to say the next 12 months will be really interesting for Tesla and of course full of entertainment provided by Elon Musk.

Well that's it from us in this special edition of our blog. We hope you enjoyed the recap of the bizarre year that the enigmatic Elon Musk has had.

If you enjoyed this or have any questions or comments then please share them below.

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