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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and other startups, provided an explanation for his bizarre tweets that have gotten him into trouble with regulators, customers and competitors.
Elon Musk’s Reason for Bad Tweets
During Musk’s controversial Saturday Night Live appearance, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX admitted to posting strange things online, saying it’s how his brain is hardwired.
Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?
Musk probably isn’t lying by blaming his bizarre or downright insulting tweets on his eccentricity. After all, we’re talking about the same guy who changed his job title to the "Technoking of Tesla" in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Now, one would be right to argue that PayPal’s former co-founder should know better than that. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of Musk’s aggressive and offensive tweeting.
The Most Bizarre Musk Tweets
In April 2020 during the height of the coronavirus pandemic when the US was reporting more than 20,000 new daily cases, the Tesla chief demanded that the government reopen the economy and "FREE AMERICA NOW."
FREE AMERICA NOW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2020
Musk also caused quite a turmoil with a thinly-veiled threat in another tweet in which he announced that workers who unionized would lose their company-paid stock options. The National Labor Relations Board was unsympathetic, ordering Musk to delete that one.
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Offending British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth by calling him a "pedo guy" in front of his millions of Twitter followers definitely isn’t one of Musk’s finer moments either.
"Funding Secured"
But the most famous Musk tweet has got to be a 2018 post in which he announced taking Tesla private at $420/share. Shares of Tesla tumbled following the "funding secured."
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018
It was this tweet in particular that prompted the US Securities and Exchange Commission to sue Musk in federal court, charging the technology entrepreneur with committing securities fraud by manipulating stock prices with tweets. All in all, the "funding secured" tweet cost Musk a $20 million fine and a position as Tesla’s chairman of the board.
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