Elon Musk seals deal to buy Twitter

In news that made the front page of virtually every mainstream newspaper in the world, the world’s richest person now controls both Tesla and Twitter.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid of social media giant Twitter has succeeded, with the 50-year-old multi-billionaire buying the public company for a total of $US44 billion ($A59b).

The purchase, once approved by US regulators, will mean that Twitter and its almost 300 million followers will be privately owned for the first time in its 14-year history.

And it gives Musk, one of Twitter’s most notorious users, unfettered access to a social media platform that he has famously claimed limits free speech.

But what does it mean for Tesla, Musk’s burgeoning electric vehicle maker and Australia’s top-selling EV brand? In short, not much.

It can be argued that Tesla has benefitted immensely from Musk’s long fascination with Twitter – and in particular Musk’s penchant for tweeting out statements or sentiments that could be construed as mischievous at best and misleading at worst.

In 2018, for example, a tweet pertaining to a buyout of Tesla drew the ire of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The tweet, which inferred that funding to take Tesla private had been secured, resulted in a spike in Tesla’s share price.

As part of a settlement, Musk – who did not admit guilt – was forced to step down as chairman of Tesla, pay a $US20 million fine and was obliged to have any sensitive information vetted by Tesla lawyers before it was published.

Musk, who refers to the SEC as the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission” was accused by the SEC of breaching that agreement in 2020.

More recently, he has tweeted numerous times about cryptocurrency company Dogecoin, stating that he wants to see it become the “the currency of Earth”. The company’s stock price jumped overnight on the back of the Musk buyout news.

Over the last few years, Tesla has moved from strength to strength as a car company. For the first quarter of 2022, it reported deliveries of more than 310,000 vehicles worldwide, with production levels in excess of 305,000 units.

This represents a jump of 68 per cent in production and sales over Q1 of 2021. More than 95 per cent of the cars were the Model 3 (Australia’s most popular EV) and the upcoming Model Y, with an estimated 165,000 vehicles built in the company’s Shanghai plant in the first three months of 2022.

To give some perspective, Tesla built just 34,494 vehicles in the first quarter of 2018.

With new plants in Berlin and Texas coming on stream, and the claimed ability to build more than 600,000 vehicles per year in its two Californian plants, Tesla has – finally – shrugged off the potential of falling under the wheels of Musk’s other ambitions.

These include colonising Mars with SpaceX, building tunnels under San Francisco with the Boring Company and developing brain-machine implants with Neuralink.

That should leave the world’s richest man – Musk is worth more than $300 billion – with more time to focus on changing the direction of one of the world’s social media giants.

Related: Tesla Cybertruck shown in near-production guise

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