One of the big stories lately, and actually over the last couple of weeks has been Tesla. And there’s a couple of pieces of news about Tesla, I’m not going to get really into it, because, you know, I could open up a video podcast and go over the charts. And, that’d be fun, too, but not today. So, this week, we have Tesla reporting earnings. So, Tesla’s reporting earnings, Elon Musk, as we all know, is the richest man in the world. And he’s also the CEO of not only Tesla, but SpaceX, and now he wants to be the CEO, or at least he wants to own all of Twitter, or at least 51%. He wants to blow out this crazy board of directors that hasn’t been doing anything for shareholders over the last several years. The stock in the last I don’t know, maybe 10 years, is still around, where it IPOs where it came public, right? So, there’s, there’s no real value being created or created for the shareholders. And so, Elon Musk is like, “Wait, there’s a there’s a big censorship problem. And they got rid of the last president, they put lots of censorship messages on some of the people’s messages that they don’t agree with, other people get banned from Twitter or get put in Twitter jail.” And Elon Musk, who claims and I believe him is a free speech guy and he feels this is not right. He stated that he is going to buy Twitter because he can afford it right? For $43 million. At $54.20, is what he came out with last week. He says I’m gonna buy Twitter for $54.20. Well, the stock when he started to accumulate, now he owns 9.9% of it. But before he started to accumulate it, it was in the low 30s. It ran all the way up to 50, just underneath or a little bit higher, actually, where he was promising to buy the company. And the board said, “whoa, whoa, whoa, we don’t want this to happen. We don’t want Elon Musk to come in here and start snooping around all of our algorithms.” “And, we don’t want him to know why we were censoring and who’s paying us.” Maybe, even though you know, a couple of stories that I’ve read are the government is paying them to censor and that the government is in cahoots with their algorithm to make sure that some of the right leaning tweets don’t get out. I don’t know what’s true.  All I know is that Elon Musk claims that he’s a free speech guy. And so he doesn’t want the censorship.  

He’s like, “let it all go out there.” There’s going to be some bad stuff, there’s going to be good stuff. But it’s not fair to set for somebody’s opinion, to be censoring, something they don’t agree with. Especially if you look back a year ago, some of these sensors were censoring things that turned out to be true. Right? This Hunter Biden laptop thing, they were censored last year, they were kicked off of Twitter, and they turned out to be true. Some of the things with COVID, or whatever you want to call it. They turned out to be true. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. All I know is that Elon Musk is like, “hey, let’s have more free speech. “ 

This country was founded on free speech. It was founded on debate, and Elon Musk wants to put his money where their mouth was. People were like,” well, if you don’t like the censorship, why don’t you just start your own Twitter?” Okay, now he’s buying Twitter. He wants to buy Twitter and people are like, no, no, no, we can’t have him buy Twitter. So, I want to see if he could do it. I think it’s a really interesting game that he’s playing, right? He’s basically said to the board that he is not negotiating. He is giving them an offer to buy their stock way higher than it is in the marketplace. He also stated “Without me, I’ve accumulated a bunch of shares. So I’m a big shareholder. So you need to listen to me, I got the dough. And I’m gonna give you $43 million for your company, when you know, before I started buying it, it was only worth about 25 million.” 

He backed the board into a corner. So, the board is like, “oh, man, if we don’t accept this”, and by the way, the board doesn’t own very many shares. It’s really funny. They’re not that invested in the company. Then if the board rejects his offer, the shareholders sue them. Because the board says “well, we can grow we can grow users a lot faster than Elon Musk”. Well, they have proven to not be able to do that. Jack Dorsey left more than a year ago, and the company has done nothing but go down,if you look at the chart, and so there’s that question right? If you don’t accept his offer, then the stock if he sells it, stocks going to go right back down to where it was and all shareholders would have lost value, most probably right. And it might even go down even lower. because they’re like, “well, Elon Musk isn’t going to compete against this, or he’s not supporting this anymore, or whatever.” If they do accept his offer well, they’re all fired, right, or at least that’s what they think is going to happen. He, he’s already basically tweeted, look, “they’re incompetent, they don’t know what they’re doing. They need to shake things up, we need to, we need to have some shareholder value built back in this company, we need to have free speech.” And the people that are there, they’re starting to quit, they’re starting to freak out. There’s lots of stress. I’ve read all kinds of crazy articles about people are stressed out now, because you got most of my other company doesn’t agree with their political views. Well, too bad, right? You know, this is a free country. And if he wants to buy it, then he wants to buy it. And you know, you don’t want to work there, you don’t have to. But there needs to be some kinds of checks and balances with free speech in this country. And I think Elon Musk is making a shot that he can do that. Now whether he could do it or not. I don’t know. But the guys seems pretty capable of doing stuff, right? He like he puts up rockets that go up and they put all these satellites up, right? Cheaper than NASA ever did cheaper than any other country ever did. And then those rockets come back and they get reused. And they land just like they took off. Have you ever seen one of these rockets land because it lands on its own but right, it’s like ticks off and it comes back turns around lands, it looks like it’s taken off in reverse. It’s amazing. 

And he’s figured out a technology in rocketry to be able to reuse that rocket, NASA didn’t do that. The government didn’t figure out that method. They were the smartest scientists in the world, this guy figured it out. This guy figured out how to, “hey, Tesla, come here and pick me up from the valet spot”. And your car gets out of the parking spot without a driver and will come and pick you up and take you to your destination without you even having to touch the steering wheel. He’s figured that out. Nobody else has figured it out, Twitter hasn’t figured it out. The government hasn’t figured it out, critics haven’t figured it out.  

And this guy knows how to do stuff, right? So just no doubt that he’s going to be able to do what he says he’s going to do is pretty remarkable. He’s done a lot of things before. He bought, and started Tesla and now he is buying Twitter. And you know, he started and sold Pay Pal, he was one of the one of the partners in that.  

All right, now let’s get to the numbers this week for tests and I have a huge position in tests on my hedge funds. It’s something that I’ve owned for more than two years. It’s a fantastic company, it’s a well-run company. It’s growing at about I don’t know, 200-300% a year in earnings, it’s killing it in revenues. The revenues are going up, you know, 25%, 30% a year. Amazingly, everybody wants to, you know, electric car, I don’t know how practical they are? I tell you; I drive 600 miles to get to some places. And I don’t want to stop and have to stay overnight to be able to charge my car, I don’t want to wait in line for a two-and-a-half-hour charge to happen. So, for me, it’s not a really practical solution. The batteries are expensive and the batteries are tough to get out of the ground, plus it ruins the earth. There’s lots of arguments that you can make about all these, all the different sides. I don’t care about that, I care about Tesla as a company, and as a stock. For me. It’s an excellent company.  

So, they’re coming out with numbers on Wednesday. The stock today being Monday is kind of flat. And I suspect it’s going to be flat. But there’s a lot of volatility that usually comes into the stock during numbers. Now, the expected move, the implied move in Tesla is about 60 to $68 coming into numbers. So, this stock could go down $68 Is the street expects or could go up $68, the street expects. My suspicion is the world wants more electric vehicles. And they got the truck coming out. They got different models coming out of the Tesla. Yes, there’s some supply chain issues. But there is a lot of demand for Tesla. So, if you’re betting on Tesla, by the way, this isn’t financial advice, this is my opinion. I have my own funds, I don’t know your situation, go talk to your own financial adviser and have him or her talk to you in or out of Tesla. I’m just telling you; this stock has been fantastic for me over the last couple of years. But I don’t like playing stocks going into numbers, I’m really conservative. And when a stock moves $68 either way on the open, after it makes numbers, is too risky for me. So, I protect myself, and I protect my investors. And we you know, try to play offense and defense which is critical. When a company reports earnings, make sure you’re protected in these numbers. And let’s just see what happens with Elon Musk, and the Twitter saga. I suspect either they’re going to take the offer, that by the way, they pass a poison pill, which basically dilutes him and makes his shares worth less as other shareholders are more favored. Because he’s trying to buy the company. This is totally unfair stuff, adopting a poison pill, because the board doesn’t want to get fired like that is not in alignment with shareholders. But anyway, we’re going to see this play out over the next couple of weeks. Hope this was interesting for you. It’s a fun little piece of news to see what Elon Musk is tweeting what he’s doing, how he’s positioning, how he’s backing that board into a quarter. I think it’s a really fantastic story and We’ll see what happens.