Despite Coinbase’s extremely successful IPO that allowed its shares to open at $381, in May an unexpected turn occurred. Coinbase fell 20.5% which is obviously a detrimental amount for any company. What could have caused this to happen? One might ask, the simple answer is Elon Musk. With the power Elon Musk holds on the modern day stock market, anything he says or does has the potential to make or break certain companies. A couple instances that prove this claim were when Elon put #bitcoin in his bio, this caused bitcoins stock to rise more than 20%. Another example of Elon’s power is when he simply tweeted “I kinda love Etsy”, this simple tweet caused the company’s stock to rise by over 9%. Clearly as I mentioned before, there is some sort of trend with certain stocks soaring after Elon mentions them even in something as informal as a tweet. Now moving back to Coinbase, one of the biggest factors that contributed to their 20.5% fall was Elon revoking his word on Bitcoin being accepted as a currency to buy Tesla. Even though this obviously affected Bitcoins stock, it majorly affected Coinbase’s stock because Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency.
This is not new news though, back in 2018 Elon Musk was fined heavily for stating that he would take Tesla private once it reaches a stock price of $420. After this instance every tweet of his was required to be viewed by Tesla’s lawyers before they were tweeted out to his extremely large following. Then shortly after in 2019, Elon was under fire once again when he tweeted about Tesla’s Solar roof production which caused the company’s stock to climb 3%. The SEC argued that his tweet should have never been posted, however Tesla’s lawyers rebutted, which is why he did not have to delete the tweet.
All this makes it evident that Elon Musk is an extremely powerful individual who can make certain stocks tank and other stocks soar. However even though corporations like the SEC have tried to combat these fluctuations, there is truly nothing we can do. Society is changing every single day and with that change comes certain things we have never seen before, like the ability to make the market fluctuate(whether intentional or not).
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