Shares of Tesla plunged as much
as 9 percent Friday after news of a pair of C-suite executive resignations and
a bizarre video showing CEO Elon Musk smoking pot on a podcast, capping a
tumultuous month since Musk launched the company into controversy with a
take-private tweet.
The stock opened Friday’s session at $260.10 before paring
losses slightly. Shares were roughly 7 percent down after the first hour of
trading. It extends a painful week for the automaker. As of Thursday’s close,
the stock had already lost 7 percent on the week.
Late Thursday, Musk smoked
marijuana and sipped whiskey during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s
podcast — fueling concerns
about his recreational drug use.
Friday morning, the company revealed its chief accounting
officer, Dave Morton, had
resigned as of Tuesday, citing intense public attention. He had been
at the company for only one month.
“Since I joined Tesla on August 6, the level of public
attention placed on the company, as well as the pace within the company, have
exceeded my expectations,” Morton said in a statement. “As a result, this
caused me to reconsider my future.”
The company’s HR chief, Gaby Toledano, is also
leaving the company, Bloomberg reported Friday. Toledano had been on leave
since before the electric car maker was rocked by messy take-private
conversations and potential SEC probes, Bloomberg previously reported, and she
will not return from leave. A spokesperson for Tesla did not immediately return
request for comment regarding Toledano’s standing at the company.
Friday is also the last day at the company for Sarah
O’Brien, Tesla’s vice president of communications, per a planned
departure.
Earlier this week Musk resurfaced
a conflict with a British cave explorer who assisted in rescuing a
boy’s soccer team from a Thai cave earlier this year. Musk called cave diver
Vernon Unsworth a “child rapist” in an email to BuzzFeed News, intensifying
previous attacks in which Musk called Unsworth a “pedo
guy” and tweeted that it
was “strange” that Unsworth had not sued him for the July comments.
All of that comes exactly one month after Musk shot off
a controversial
tweetsaying he was “considering taking Tesla private.” Musk floated a
take-private price of $420 — roughly a 20 percent upside from the stock’s
levels at the time — and claimed he had the “funding secured.”
Company updates and news reports in the weeks that followed
poked holes in Musk’s proposal, though, and Tesla formally called
off the take-private talks in late August.
Friday’s plunge puts Tesla stock more than 30 percent off
its all-time intraday high of $389.61. The stock has lost more than 20 percent
of its value since market close on Aug. 7.
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