Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk will unveil a new four-wheel drive version of the Model S car in Hawthorne, California on October 9, 2014.
Lucy Nicholson | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to be behind GameStop’s epic wave, tweeting a link to the Reddit board that largely hypnotized the stock.
Shares of GameStop were up more than 60% in after-hours trading on Tuesday following Musk’s tweet, which linked to the “wallstreetbets” Reddit page that has more than 2 million subscribers. Tesla’s CEO tweeted “Gamestonk !!”
The stock rose earlier in the day after Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya said in a tweet that he bought GameStop call options, betting that the stock will go higher. The stock closed 92.7% higher on Tuesday.
Musk’s phone calls to certain companies have previously affected stock prices. Earlier Tuesday, he tweeted about a hand-knitted wool hat he bought for his dog on Etsy. That caused the company’s stock to rise as much as 8% in premarket trading, although it ended up closing 2.1%.
The CEO has been in trouble with the SEC for tweeting about Tesla’s stock. In August 2018, he said he wanted to take Tesla privately for $ 420 a share and that he obtained the funding for this. Musk and Tesla each had to pay the SEC a $ 20 million fine to settle the lawsuit, and Musk has since agreed to submit his public statements about Tesla’s finances and other issues to his legal counsel for review. Last year, he infamously tweeted that Tesla’s stock was “too high,” and a week later he sent the stock even higher.
– Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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