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- Elon Musk has driven X, formerly Twitter, into the ground.
- Tesla is about to be overtaken by its Chinese rival BYD.
- Somehow, Musk keeps getting richer.
It should be a year of schadenfreude for long-suffering Elon Musk observers.
The controversial billionaire has gone from crisis to crisis this year. He has driven X, the site he paid $44 billion for, into the ground. The CEO he appointed to run X, Linda Yaccarino, has failed to impress. He told X's fleeing advertisers to "go fuck themselves," never a winning account management strategy. Tesla is about to lose its crown as the biggest EV maker globally to China's BYD.
And yet Musk has somehow managed to end up almost $100 billion richer this year, according to Bloomberg's billionaire index.
The bird is free (and also broke)
Musk has been richer than now, peaking at $340 billion in 2021. He lost $182 billion in net wealth in 2022, but accumulated $97 billion through 2023 to take his net worth back to $235 billion, per Bloomberg.
He retains his place as the world's richest person, despite X reportedly having its valuation slashed to $19 billion, roughly half what Musk paid for the company in October 2022.
The financing of his acquisition acquisition, contingent on loans secured against his Tesla stock, left business experts puzzled.
Wedbush Securities analyst and Tesla bull Dan Ives described the move as "giving away caviar to buy a hot dog on the street in New York City."
The loans saddled X with around $13 billion in debt, requiring the company to pay $1.5 billion in interest a year.
The X deal has also given the general public unprecedented insight into how Musk makes product decisions — that is to say, chaotically.
Musk has radically overhauled X as he seeks to turn it into an "everything app", but his surprise rebrand from Twitter to X in July annoyed users and baffled marketing experts.
Allen Adamson, a cofounder of brand consultant group Metaforce, slammed the rebrand as "completely irrational from a business and brand point of view," telling Fortune it was a complete "ego decision" by Musk.
Other radical changes to the site formerly known as Twitter have similarly failed to impress, with experts telling Business Insider that Musk's plan to charge users to use the site (which the company is now testing out in New Zealand and the Philippines) doesn't make sense.
"It doesn't make much financial sense because any serious charge that could raise significant revenue would end up driving people onto alternative networks," said Charlie Beckett, a professor at the London School of Economics.
The Tesla CEO and prolific poster has a long history of getting into trouble with his tweets, but his post endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory sparked furious backlash and an advertiser exodus.
Several major companies had already scaled back advertising on the platform due to rising levels of hate speech after Musk had cut Twitter's content moderation teams to the bone.
But Musk's post turned a trickle into a flood, with Disney, Apple, and Walmart all suspending ad spending. Musk didn't help matters by telling advertisers to "go fuck themselves" at the NYT's Dealbook summit.
Tesla and SpaceX still going strong
The reason Musk has seen his wealth go up this year despite X's very public struggles is simple — his other companies are doing much better.
Musk's wealth primarily comprises his stockholdings — the higher the share price, the more valuable he is. The share price gains have eclipsed X's drama so far.
The billionaire's rocket company SpaceX is now reportedly valued at $175 billion, more than Disney or Comcast.
And Tesla has seen its share price rise by more than 100% year-to-date.
Tesla does face challenges, such as the safety of Autopilot and the threat of competition. But so far these haven't proven existential.
The Model Y became the best-selling car in the world this year. As BI's Nora Naughton and Grace Kay wrote, Musk looked savvy when his price cuts helped attract more budget-minded EV buyers. And the long-awaited launch of the Cybertruck also showed Tesla can still get the world talking.
Musk's high-risk, high-reward approach has mostly worked in his favor to date. But his volatile behavior could implode any of his ventures, observers say.
"Musk is just such an unpredictable person, that I would count it among one of the top risks for Tesla," Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, told Bloomberg in July.
In a January note, Wedbush's Ives described X as a "a distraction and overhang for the Tesla story/stock in our opinion."
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, made outside normal working hours.