Five times Elon Musk changed the rules with his tweets – Times of India

Elon Musk has bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc, becoming the largest shareholder in the microblogging platform that is valued at more than $40 billion on the New York Stock Exchange.
Though the deal was announced on Monday it was contracted in the first half of March, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has revealed.
That was the time the Tesla CEO’s long-running spat with the US market regulator hit a high. It was just the latest in a long-running list of people and institutions the world’s richest man had rubbed the wrong way with his tweets.
Here are five instances when Musk changed the rules of the game with his tweets.

Mandate for lawyer-approved tweets
In early March 2022, the week he snapped up the Twitter stake, Musk moved the courts to remove a muzzle the SEC had placed on his tweets earlier.
The regulator had sued the Tesla CEO in 2018 after he tweeted that he had “funding secured” to potentially take his electric-car company private at $420 per share. But a buyout was not on the cards and the Tesla stock fell sharply.
Tesla and Musk settled by agreeing to pay $20 million each in civil fines and let lawyers vet some of Musk’s tweets in advance, including posts that could affect Tesla’s stock price. Musk also gave up Tesla’s chairmanship.

That didn’t stop him from tweeting a poll in November 2021 on whether he should sell some of his Tesla stock. A majority did, and the poll sent Tesla shares into a slump again. Musk has since sold $16.4 billion of the car maker’s stock.
Later in March 2022, the SEC told Musk he should just grin and bear the muzzle.

Wading into a Covid controversy
In March 2020, when information about the exact effects of Covid were scarce and the world was worrying about saving its most vulnerable, Musk tweeted that children were “essentially immune” from the virus.
It wasn’t a settled effect at the time, and the early indications were to the contrary. Later research confirmed that though the effect of successive Covid variants on children and adolescents was not as severe as on the elderly, it was surely something to be careful about.
There was an uproar around the world about Musk’s tweet, who brushed it off. Twitter announced a policy for Covid guidance soon after, but refused to take down the confusing tweet by one of its most popular blue-ticked users.
Moving markets with one hashtag
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, had a rough 2021. It touched a high of $64,000 in April, only to plummet to nearly $30,000 the following month. Adding to the turbulence was Musk.
In December 2020, Musk added to the rush for investment in adding #Bitcoin to his Twitter bio, something that would ensure that the world would not miss it.
But when a few months later researchers at Cambridge University showed bitcoin’s electricity usage – the power used to ‘mine’ the digital currency – was more than entire countries such as Sweden and Malaysia, Musk said he was stopping Tesla’s dalliance with the currency. This caused the currency to fall off a cliff.

Swaying crypto again with a word
On 18 July 2020, Musk tweeted: “Excuse me, I only sell Doge.” At the time, some in the car market thought he was playing on the name of an old American competitor, the Dodge car company. But the allusion to the cryptocurrency Doge wasn’t lost on those in the cryptocurrency market.
If anyone at all missed out, he tweeted again in December that year, “One word: Doge” and changed his Twitter bio to “Former CEO of Dogecoin”. On Christmas 2020, he wished his followers happy holidays with a picture that included the Dogecoin dog.

His tweets’ effect on the cryptocurrency market has been so pervasive that Lennart Ante of the Blockchain Research Lab in Germany measured what she called ‘the Musk effect’. He identified Musk tweets (or “events” like changing his Twitter bio) that referred to cryptocurrencies — two of mentioning Bitcoin and four citing Dogecoin.

Pressing Twitter’s hottest button
Soon after Musk’s Twitter stake purchase was announced, he tweeted something that has long been a demand from the Twitterati – an edit button.
Twitter’s founder-CEO Jack Dorsey explained in a 2020 interview why Twitter doesn’t have an edit button. “The reason there’s no edit button [and] there hasn’t been an edit button traditionally is we started as an SMS text messaging service. When you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.”
Dorsey stepped down as CEO, his second stint in the seat, in late 2021. But this week, within a few hours of the world knowing that he was now the largest shareholder of Twitter, Musk was pressing the same hot button.
The misspelt answers? Take it as a Muskism.