Is Elon Musk coming to Düsseldorf, or is he not coming? This is the question that analysts and investors are currently asking themselves: will the Tesla CEO personally announce the company’s quarterly results on Wednesday after the US stock market closes? In fact, Musk doesn’t want to do that anymore, as he announced last summer. But the 51-year-old only kept his intention for a quarter. Then he spoke again.
So if Musk appears before the analysts on Wednesday evening, then he has no good news to announce. Because one expects “a difficult second quarter due to the ongoing supply problems and factory closures,” said analyst Bill Selesky of Argus Research.
These are difficult times for Musk, 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 at the same time, a message from his private life comes to the public: Musk has a pair of twins with Shivon Zilis, the operational head of Neuralink, one of his companies.
A hot summer for Musk, not least because of his idiosyncratic decisions. Last April, for example, he announced that he would buy the short messaging service Twitter for $ 44 billion – without doing the usual due diligence first, i.e. gaining access to the company’s internal figures.
His withdrawal a few days ago came as little surprise, 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 responds with a delaying tactic: the longer the process drags on, the more Twitter stock could fall and strengthen Musk’s negotiating position.
“Millions of Twitter shares are traded every day under a cloud of doubts created by Musk,” the social media platform explained last Monday. No listed company of this size and scope has ever had to endure these uncertainties. Twitter has therefore asked the US judge in charge to reject Musk’s proposal for a trial date in February and to hold the trial in September.
According to legal experts, in all likelihood, the two parties will reach an agreement out of court. One way or another, Musk has to pay a billion dollars in contractual penalties, now it’s all about the amount of the agreement going beyond that – which could easily be in the double-digit billion range.
The SEC has a say
A letter from the US Securities and Exchange Commission almost seems like a side issue: the SEC is taking a close look at Musk’s tweets, especially the one from May 17. There, the Tesla BOSS wrote that the deal with Twitter “could not be carried out” if the company did not provide more information. According to the SEC lawyers, Musk would have had to write a stock market obligation notice for this.
Even in private, it will not be boring with Musk. Just a few days ago it became known 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 the computer.
Already last November, Zilis gave birth to the twins, the names and gender are unknown. The timing is delicate: a few weeks later, a surrogate mother gave birth to a daughter of Musk and his former girlfriend, pop singer Grimes. The matter with Zilis came to light only a few weeks ago, when the native Canadian had the surnames of the babies subsequently changed to “Musk”.
Zilis studied economics and philosophy at the elite Yale University, with a special interest in machine intelligence. She started at IBM after her studies to later work on the autopilot project at Tesla and has been working at Neuralink since 2017.
This makes Elon Musk the father of a total 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 the industrialized nations, that civilization is in danger. “I mean, I’m doing my best, haha,” he wrote on Twitter.
