Unpacking unintended consequences of Elon Musk's $7bn Tesla tweet

It’s been an insane six weeks for South African-born-and-bred super entrepreneur Elon Musk. At about two o clock in the afternoon on Tuesday 7th August, while he was on an aeroplane, the boy from Pretoria launched one of the most expensive tweets of all time. Musk’s assertion that he would be taking Tesla Motor Company private at $420 a share with “funding secured”, sent the share price soaring before a collapse to the current $300 – a market value loss of $7bn from the pre-tweet level and $14bn from its immediate post-tweet peak. In a throwback to the golden age of news gathering when newspaper assigned specialised “watchers” to major companies, Bloomberg’s San Francisco-based business reporter Dana Hull is charged with focusing all her attention on Elon Musk, and his companies Tesla and SpaceX. Brad Stone is the best-selling author of a book on Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos that resulted in the discovery of the man who fathered the world’s richest person. That was a New York Times bestseller. So was his latest book, published in 2017, called The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb and the killer companies of the new Silicon Valley are changing the world. In this superb edition of Bloomberg’s Encrypted, Hull and Stone revisit the Elon Musk story since August 7, and project what comes next. A must listen.