There’s trouble brewing in Elon Musk’s paradise.
The billionaire saw his net worth plunge by a whopping $13 billion in a matter of just 24 hours, Bloomberg reports — and on 4/20 to boot, Musk’s much-beloved weed joke date.
And it wasn’t just the fact that SpaceX’s Starship started spinning uncontrollably, ending in a massive explosion shortly after the space company kicked off the rocket’s first-ever orbital launch attempt.
Musk attended the event at the company’s testing facilities in Boca Chica, Texas, watching somberly as the rocket started to veer off course, perhaps a fitting analogy for a 4/20 that was meant to be his day.
While many experts have since argued that SpaceX’s colossal explosion in the sky was a success due to the data it garnered, Musk’s other big ventures were suffering on Thursday as well, with Tesla revealing disappointing first-quarter results that caused the EV maker’s stocks to plunge over nine percent.
It was an almost three-month low for the carmaker, with price cuts weighing heavy on the company’s profit margins, disappointing Wall Street.
Many investors are still outright furious at Musk for his continued antics and for what they say amounts to abandoning his leadership role at Tesla while busying himself with SpaceX and Twitter.
“There is collective frustration,” Tesla shareholder Ivan Frishberg told Bloomberg. “Over the last year, it became quite clear that Tesla suffers from a governance problem.”
“I can’t imagine any other board allowing a CEO to have as many outside business activities,” Courtney Wicks, executive director of Investor Advocates for Social Justice, told the outlet, pointing out that a CEO running this many companies is “unprecedented.”
Even Twitter, an ongoing “flaming dumpster” that has sucked up much of the richest man in the world’s time as of late, wasn’t spared. The company chose 4/20 as the day it removed legacy blue verification checkmarks from prominent users, the overwhelming majority of whom refused to pay $8 a month for the service, which doesn’t actually verify identity like it used to.
Several celebrities, including author Stephen King and NBA legend LeBron James, who have said they’d never pay Musk for the privilege, were surprised to find their checkmarks weren’t removed.
As it later turned out, Musk seemingly dug into his own pockets to pay himself $8 a month on their behalf. In many ways, it was a bizarre and desperate decision, especially considering nobody had asked him to do such a thing.
In short, Thursday did, in fact, shape up to “be quite the day!” as Musk predicted in a late Wednesday night tweet. (“Such a great day in so many ways,” he tweeted following the turbulent 24 hours.)
Whether you see the day’s events as a big success or resounding failure is open for at least some interpretation. SpaceX likely collected a lot of valuable data during Thursday’s explosion. Pissing off celebrities on Twitter, while being a clearly pointless endeavor, isn’t itself of much consequence, either, at the end of the day.
But one thing’s clear: Tesla investors aren’t laughing.