ELON MUSK - WHO IS THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD

 

 

In your redemptive quest use our A - Z or steer a righteous course HOME toward enlightenment praise the Lord

 

 

 

 

 

You cannot take your money with you, so why not put it to good use

 

 



As the world population explodes, there are proportionally more billionaires on the planet, the product of exploiting manufacturing and selling of products and services. Meaning of course, that there will be proportionally more poor people, who are being exploited. There is though nothing wrong with making money, provided that it is put to good use. Since, money is just a tool to accomplish things. Not a pile of paper notes to be counted for pleasure, or vaults of gold or jewels. Though, the latter would be preferable, since at least is looks better than a stack of pulp, or a digital display, when online banking.

 

It is a sobering thought, that in order to make money, energy is used. Hence, money generates a large carbon footprint, where a responsible attitude to increasing greenhouse gases, would and should be to offset the CO2, as far as is practical.

 

That is why many wealthy people set up charitable foundations. Donating substantial sums to good causes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DAILY MAIL 20 JANUARY 2023 - ELON MUSK SOLD NEARLY $3.6B WORTH OF TESLA SHARES BEFORE THE COMPANY SAID IT MISSED DELIVERY TARGETS

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold almost $3.6 billion worth of stock just three weeks before the electric car company announced it had missed its delivery targets. 

Musk had offset nearly 22 million of his 426 million shares between December 12 and 14, 2022, as Tesla was projected to be one of the worst performing stocks of the year, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

While the end of 2022 saw a small rebound for the company's shares, the stocks plummeted even further when the market opened on January 3 following the company's announcement that delivery targets fell short by nearly 22,000 cars.

Given the timing of the deal, Donald Langevoort, another securities law professor at Georgetown University, called for greater transparency. 

'Is it suspicious? Yes. Is it entirely possible there are other explanations? Of course,' Langevoort told the WSJ. 'But that's what the enforcement process is all about.'

Along with the shares sold in December, Musk has sold more than $39 billion worth of stock since its peak back in November 2021, the majority of which was used to fund his $44 billion Twitter takeover.

Even after all the sales, Musk still owns 426.6 million shares of Tesla, giving him a 13.4 percent ownership position in his company. 

The recent sales in December added up to more than a third of the shares he sold in 2022, with the timing raising questions about insider trading. 

Insider trading refers to the illegal practice of trading shares through confidential information. In Musk's case, it would be selling off 22 million shares while knowing about the disappointing sales numbers before it was public knowledge. 

'The issue here is, what did he know and what was the market anticipating when he sold,' James Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University, told WSJ. 'That's a critical moment.' 

'This should be of great interest to the SEC,' he added. 

While the SEC prohibits insider trading, there are several exceptions, one of which Musk has used before. By filing for a preset trading schedule with the SEC, known as a 10b5-1 plan, corporate insiders are mostly free to sell and buy their company stocks. 

Although the December trade was filed without the preset schedule, the SEC rules at the time meant he didn't have to disclose whether or not he was actually using the plan. 

Tesla did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment. The SEC declined to comment.

Musk's trade in December came as the company stock dropped by 42 percent that month alone, ending 2022 with a 69 percent dip. 

The drop in Tesla's stock, the lowest in two years, came as Reuters reported that the electric car company suspended production at its Shanghai Gigafactory. 

Meanwhile, a Reuters analysis showed that prices of used Tesla cars were falling faster than those of other carmakers, weighing on demand for the company's new vehicles rolling off the assembly line. 

According to the latest delivery numbers released by the automaker, the company delivered an impressive 1.3 million vehicles last year - a more than 40 percent increase for the year prior. 

But the company's fourth quarter numbers still managed to fall short of Wall Street’s expectations. 

Over the past three months, Tesla delivered an underwhelming 405,278 vehicles, the data shows - well below the median estimate of 431,000 laid by analysts. 

The data - which serves as the closest approximation of sales for the company - illustrates that while seeing success in the early stages of 2022 and year preceding, Tesla’s pace of growth is slowing.

Last month, Musk said he would not sell any more shares in Tesla for at least 18 months in an apparent attempt to comfort shareholders who have watched the stock drop nearly half of its value since the CEO's purchase of Twitter went through in October.

'I'm not selling any stock for 18 to 24 months,' Musk said. 

 

 

PA MEDIA - ELON MUSK DEFENDS TESLA BUYOUT TWEETS IN CIVIL COURT CASE

Elon Musk went into the witness box on Friday to defend a 2018 tweet claiming he had lined up the financing to take Tesla private in a deal that never came close to happening.

The tweet resulted in a 40 million dollar (£32 million) settlement with securities regulators. It also led to a class-action lawsuit alleging he misled investors, pulling him into court for about half an hour on Friday to deliver sworn testimony in front of a nine-person jury and a full room of media and other spectators.

The trial was then adjourned for the weekend and Mr Musk was told to return on Monday to answer more questions.

In his initial appearance, Mr Musk defended his prolific tweeting as “the most democratic way” to distribute information even while acknowledging constraints of Twitter’s 280-character limit can make it difficult to make everything as clear as possible.

“I think you can absolutely be truthful (on Twitter),” Mr Musk asserted. “But can you be comprehensive? Of course not.”

Mr Musk’s latest headache stems from the inherent brevity on Twitter, a service that he has been running since completing his 44 billion dollar (£36 billion) purchase of it in October.

The trial hinges on the question of whether a pair of tweets that Mr Musk posted on August 7, 2018, damaged Tesla shareholders during a 10-day period leading up to Mr Musk’s admission that the buyout he had envisioned was not going to happen.

In the first of those those two 2018 tweets, Musk stated “funding secured” for a what would have been a 72 billion dollar (£58 billion) buyout of Tesla at a time when the electric automaker was still grapping with production problems and was worth far less than it is now. Mr Musk followed up a few hours later with another tweet suggesting a deal was imminent.

After it became apparent that the money was not in place to take Tesla private, Mr Musk stepped down as Tesla’s chairman while remaining CEO as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission settlement, without acknowledging any wrongdoing.

The billionaire came into court wearing a dark suit and tie on the third day of the civil trial in San Francisco that his lawyer unsuccessfully tried to move to Texas, where Tesla is now headquartered, on the premise that media coverage of his tumultuous takeover of Twitter had tainted the jury pool.

The jury that was assembled earlier this week focused intently on Mr Musk while he answered questions posed by Nicholas Porritt, a lawyer representing Tesla shareholders.

At one point, Mr Musk asked Mr Porritt if he would speak closer to the microphone so he could hear him better. At other times, Mr Musk craned his neck as he gazed around the courtroom.

Mr Musk, 51, said he cares “a great deal” about investors and also railed against short sellers who make investments that reward them when a company’s stock price falls. He called short selling an “evil” practice that should be outlawed, denigrating those who profit from it as “a bunch of sharks”.

When shown communications from Tesla investors urging him to curtail or completely stop his Twitter habit before the 2018 buyout tweet, Mr Musk said he could not remember all those interactions from years ago, especially since he gets a “Niagara Falls” of emails.

Even before Mr Musk took the stand, US District Judge Edward Chen had declared that the jurors can consider those two tweets to be false, leaving them to decide whether Mr Musk deliberately deceived investors and whether his statements saddled them with losses.

Mr Musk has previously contended he entered into the SEC settlement under duress and maintained he believed he had locked up financial backing for a Tesla buyout during meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

An expert on corporate buyouts hired by shareholder lawyers to study the events surrounding Mr Musk’s proposal to take Tesla private spent the bulk of his three hours in the witness box on Friday deriding the plan as an ill-conceived concept.

“This proposal was an extreme outlier,” said Guhan Subramanian, a Harvard University business and law professor for more than 20 years. “It was incoherent. It was illusory.”

In a lengthy cross examination that delayed Mr Musk’s appearance, a lawyer for Tesla’s board of directors tried to undermine Subramanian’s testimony by pointing out that it relied on graduate student assistance to review some of the material related to the August 2018 tweets. The lawyer, William Price, also noted Subramanian’s 1,900 dollar-per-hour (£1,533) fee for compiling his report for the case.

The trial over his Tesla tweets come at a time when Mr Musk has been focusing on Twitter while also serving as the automaker’s CEO and also remaining deeply involved in SpaceX, the rocket ship company he founded.

Mr Musk’s leadership of Twitter — where he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers — has proven unpopular among Tesla’s current stockholders, who are worried he has been devoting less time steering the automaker at a time of intensifying competition.

Those concerns contributed to a 65% decline in Tesla’s stock last year that wiped out more than 700 billion dollars (£565 billion) in shareholder wealth — far more than the 14 billion dollar (£11.3 billion) swing in fortune that occurred between the company’s high and low stock prices during the August 7-17 2018 period covered in the class-action lawsuit.

Tesla’s stock has split twice since then, making the 420 dollar buyout price cited in his 2018 tweet worth 28 dollars on adjusted basis now. The company’s shares were trading around 133 dollars on Friday, down from the company’s November 2021 split-adjusted peak of 414.50 dollars.

After Mr Musk dropped the idea of a Tesla buyout, the company overcame its production problems, resulting in a rapid upturn in car sales that caused its stock to soar and made Mr Musk the world’s richest person until he bought Twitter. Mr Musk dropped from the top spot on the wealth list after the stock market’s backlash to his handling of Twitter.

When asked on Friday about the challenges that Tesla faced in 2018, he recalled spending many nights sleeping at the automaker’s California factory as he tried to keep the company afloat.

“The sheer level of pain to make Tesla successful during that 2017, 2018 period was excruciating,” he recalled.

Mr Musk, 51, said he cares “a great deal” about investors and also railed against short sellers who make investments that reward them when a company’s stock price falls. He called short selling an “evil” practice that should be outlawed, denigrating those who profit from it as “a bunch of sharks”.

When shown communications from Tesla investors urging him to curtail or completely stop his Twitter habit before the 2018 buyout tweet, Mr Musk said he could not remember all those interactions from years ago, especially since he gets a “Niagara Falls” of emails.

Even before Mr Musk took the stand, US District Judge Edward Chen had declared that the jurors can consider those two tweets to be false, leaving them to decide whether Mr Musk deliberately deceived investors and whether his statements saddled them with losses.

Mr Musk has previously contended he entered into the SEC settlement under duress and maintained he believed he had locked up financial backing for a Tesla buyout during meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

An expert on corporate buyouts hired by shareholder lawyers to study the events surrounding Mr Musk’s proposal to take Tesla private spent the bulk of his three hours in the witness box on Friday deriding the plan as an ill-conceived concept.

“This proposal was an extreme outlier,” said Guhan Subramanian, a Harvard University business and law professor for more than 20 years. “It was incoherent. It was illusory.”

In a lengthy cross examination that delayed Mr Musk’s appearance, a lawyer for Tesla’s board of directors tried to undermine Subramanian’s testimony by pointing out that it relied on graduate student assistance to review some of the material related to the August 2018 tweets. The lawyer, William Price, also noted Subramanian’s 1,900 dollar-per-hour (£1,533) fee for compiling his report for the case.

The trial over his Tesla tweets come at a time when Mr Musk has been focusing on Twitter while also serving as the automaker’s CEO and also remaining deeply involved in SpaceX, the rocket ship company he founded.

Mr Musk’s leadership of Twitter — where he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers — has proven unpopular among Tesla’s current stockholders, who are worried he has been devoting less time steering the automaker at a time of intensifying competition.

Those concerns contributed to a 65% decline in Tesla’s stock last year that wiped out more than 700 billion dollars (£565 billion) in shareholder wealth — far more than the 14 billion dollar (£11.3 billion) swing in fortune that occurred between the company’s high and low stock prices during the August 7-17 2018 period covered in the class-action lawsuit.

Tesla’s stock has split twice since then, making the 420 dollar buyout price cited in his 2018 tweet worth 28 dollars on adjusted basis now. The company’s shares were trading around 133 dollars on Friday, down from the company’s November 2021 split-adjusted peak of 414.50 dollars.

After Mr Musk dropped the idea of a Tesla buyout, the company overcame its production problems, resulting in a rapid upturn in car sales that caused its stock to soar and made Mr Musk the world’s richest person until he bought Twitter. Mr Musk dropped from the top spot on the wealth list after the stock market’s backlash to his handling of Twitter.

When asked on Friday about the challenges that Tesla faced in 2018, he recalled spending many nights sleeping at the automaker’s California factory as he tried to keep the company afloat.

“The sheer level of pain to make Tesla successful during that 2017, 2018 period was excruciating,” he recalled.

 

 

ELON MUSK NOW HOLDS WORLD RECORD FOR FOR GREATEST LOSS OF WEALTH

'Forbes' reports that Musk's net worth went from $320 billion in 2021 to $138 billion in January 2023. Plummeting Tesla shares accounted for much of the drop. Those shares fell even more after Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. Those shares fell even more after Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. According to the Guinness World Records, the $182 billion to $200 billion Musk lost is the "largest loss of personal fortune in history". Softbank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son previously held the record for losing $58.6 billion in 2000.

 

 

THE TOP TEN - 2022

 

1. ELON MUSK


Age: 51
Residence: Texas
Co-founder and CEO: Tesla
Net Worth: $203 billion
Tesla Ownership Stake: 15% ($90.6 billion)
Other Assets: Space Exploration Technologies ($46.9 billion private asset), The Boring Company ($3.33 billion private asset), Twitter ($16.2 billion public asset)

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. He was born in South Africa and attended a university in Canada before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor's degrees in physics and economics. Two days after enrolling in a graduate physics program at Stanford University, Musk deferred attendance to launch Zip2, one of the earliest online navigation services. He reinvested a portion of the proceeds from this startup to create X.com, the online payment system that was sold to eBay (EBAY) and ultimately became PayPal Holdings (PYPL).

In 2004, Musk became a major funder of Tesla Motors (now Tesla), which led to his current position as CEO of the electric vehicle company.

In addition to its line of electric automobiles, Tesla produces energy storage devices, automobile accessories, and, through its acquisition of SolarCity in 2016, solar power systems.

Tesla. "Elon Musk."

Musk is also CEO and chief engineer of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a developer of space launch rockets.

In 2020, Tesla shares soared 740% to propel Musk up the wealth rankings. In December 2020, Tesla joined the S&P 500, becoming the largest company added. In January 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world - a title he's held since then.

Musk asked his Twitter (TWTR) audience on Nov. 6, 2021, whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock, framing the issue as a response to criticism of unrealized capital gains as a means of avoiding taxes.

He proceeded to sell shares worth $16.4 billion over the remainder of 2021.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, cited a media report that Musk paid no income tax for 2018 to argue for the adoption of a wealth tax. "And if you opened your eyes for two seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year," Musk responded on Twitter.

Thanks to the surge in Tesla shares in 2021 and private transactions boosting the reported valuation of SpaceX, Musk's lead in the global wealth rankings has continued to grow. His net worth hit a high of $340 billion in November 2021.

In April 2022, Musk began a campaign to take Twitter private, which culminated in a $44 billion buyout. Musk planned to fund the deal with $21 billion of his own capital. In the run-up to the buyout announcement, Musk sold 9.6 million shares of Tesla, valued at roughly $8.5 billion.

In July 2022, Musk decided to back out of the Twitter buyout. Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk to force the buyout to go through. Musk countersued the company but then reversed course and declared he was willing to buy Twitter after all. The deal officially closed in October 2022, giving him an almost 80% stake in the company.

 

 

THE TOP TEN RICHEST - 2022

 

1. ELON MUSK
2. BERNARD ARNAULT
3. GAUTAM ADANI
4. JEFF BEZOS
5. BILL GATES
6. WARREN BUFFET
7. LARRY ELLISON
8. LARRY PAGE
9. MUKESH AMBANI
10. SERGEY BRIN

 

 

JOHN STORM & THE CURE FOR CANCER

 

In this work of fiction, antagonist, Musket Meloni is fast approaching becoming the world's first trillionaire. He's had a brush with cancer, and is looking for a cure, should it return and spread. When he learns that John Storm has cured Pope Peter Benedict, who had stage IV, advanced cancer, having spread to lymph nodes, other organs and tissues of his body, he was immediately interest in acquiring the asset, in company takeover style.

 

Musket Meloni had stage two cancer. It had grown, but not spread. The treatments seemed to be keeping the disease at bay. But for how long?

 

 

 

REFERENCE

 

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/elon-musk-now-holds-world-record-for-greatest-loss-of-wealth/vi-AA16ceDK
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/elon-musk-sold-nearly-3-6b-worth-of-tesla-shares-before-the-company-said-it-missed-delivery-targets/ar-AA16zbF4
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11658565/Elon-Musk-sold-nearly-3-6B-worth-Tesla-shares-company-said-missed-delivery-targets.html
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/elon-musk-defends-tesla-buyout-tweets-in-civil-court-case/ar-AA16Afz6

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/elon-musk-now-holds-world-record-for-greatest-loss-of-wealth/vi-AA16ceDK
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/elon-musk-sold-nearly-3-6b-worth-of-tesla-shares-before-the-company-said-it-missed-delivery-targets/ar-AA16zbF4
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11658565/Elon-Musk-sold-nearly-3-6B-worth-Tesla-shares-company-said-missed-delivery-targets.html
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/elon-musk-defends-tesla-buyout-tweets-in-civil-court-case/ar-AA16Afz6

 

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In your redemptive quest use our A - Z or steer a righteous course HOME toward enlightenment praise the Lord

 

 

  AN A TO Z INDEX OF THE WORLD'S RICHEST AND MOST POWERFUL MEN AND WOMEN ON PLANET EARTH

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