Dusseldorf Is Elon Musk coming or not? That’s the question analysts and investors are currently asking: Will the Tesla boss personally announce the company’s quarterly results on Wednesday after the US market close? Musk actually doesn’t want to do that anymore, as he announced last summer. But the 51-year-old only kept his resolution for a quarter. Then he spoke up again.
So when Musk appears before analysts Wednesday night, he doesn’t have good news to share. “A difficult second quarter is expected due to ongoing supply problems and factory closures,” said Argus Research analyst Bill Selesky.
These are difficult times for Musk, and not just at Tesla. The purchase of Twitter, which he canceled, employs a whole army of lawyers, upsets investors and causes a new dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. And along the way, a message from his private life made its way to the public: Musk has a pair of twins with Shivon Zilis, the operational head of Neuralink, one of his companies.
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A hot summer for Musk, not least because of his idiosyncratic decisions. Last April, for example, he announced that he would buy the short message service Twitter for $44 billion – without first doing the usual due diligence, i.e. gaining access to the company’s internal figures.
His withdrawal a few days ago came as no surprise, as Musk had long complained about the high number of false and spam accounts. Twitter filed a lawsuit, insisting on compliance with the purchase agreement. Musk responded with a delaying tactic: The longer the process drags on, the more Twitter shares could fall and strengthen Musk’s negotiating position.
The Tesla founder has to pay a billion dollar contractual penalty one way or the other.
(Photo: Reuters)
Twitter agrees: “Millions of Twitter shares trade daily under a cloud of Musk-created doubt,” the social media platform said last Monday. No public company of this size and scope has ever had to endure these uncertainties. Twitter has therefore asked the responsible US judge to reject Musk’s proposal for a trial date in February and to hold the trial in September.
According to legal experts, the two parties will most likely reach an out-of-court settlement. Musk has to pay a billion dollar penalty one way or another, now it’s all about the amount of the agreement that goes beyond that – which could easily be in the tens of billions.
SEC speaks up
A letter from the US Securities and Exchange Commission seems almost irrelevant: The SEC is looking closely at Musk’s tweets, especially the May 17 one. There the Tesla boss wrote that the deal with Twitter “could not go through” if the company did not provide more information. According to the SEC lawyers, Musk should have written a mandatory stock exchange notification for this.
Even privately, it doesn’t get boring with Musk. Just a few days ago it was announced that he has twins with Shivon Zilis, who works as the “Director of Operations and Special Projects” at Neuralink. The company, founded by Musk in 2016, wants to use neurotechnology to connect the brain and computers.
Zilis gave birth to the twins last November, names and sex are unknown. The timing is delicate: a few weeks later, a surrogate mother gave birth to a daughter of Musk and his former girlfriend, the pop singer Grimes. The Zilis thing only came to light a few weeks ago, when the Canadian-born later changed the babies’ last names to “Musk.”
Zilis studied economics and philosophy at Yale University, with a special interest in machine intelligence. After graduating, she started at IBM and later worked at Tesla on the autopilot project and has worked at Neuralink since 2017.
Elon Musk is the father of nine children, seven of whom were born as twins or triplets. This is not necessarily a coincidence, but the result of in vitro fertilization. Musk has often expressed concern about a falling birth rate in industrialized countries, civilization is in danger. “I mean I’m doing my best haha,” he wrote on Twitter.
More: Musk wants to delay trial of multi-billion dollar Twitter takeover