Elon Musk in the crisis-does Teflon-Elon get the first scratch?

For a long time, Elon Musk had a trick: he simply had problems bouncing off. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter – None of his business ideas seemed to be able to fail. What he touches becomes gold, no matter how big the resistances were. He discredited critics, scandals or not – nothing seemed to get stuck on Musk. But now Teflon-Elon seems to get the first scratch.

Sure, Musk’s entrepreneurship has always been abundant. This brought him great reputation with his fans. For a long time it looked like he was the personified tech revolution. The billionaire saw the future of the car in electromobility. He built Tesla, most of them were happy about cheap fuel prices. And what would be a revolutionary without (a little) megalomania? So Musk founded a company with SpaceX to colonize space. His goal: Mars. Space is the limit – or: just not.

It was only problematic about Musk when he discovered politics for himself. And there was and is probably a pioneer: rarely has you seen a celebrity who radicalized himself so quickly. He practically took over Twitter within a few weeks and turned it into the online boxing booth that is today. Freedom of expression, that also seems to include insults, hate messages and fake news for Musk.

And when all of this wasn’t enough, he also goes to bed with Donald Trump. That was also a risk. But the view of the naked numbers all over the conclusion that Musk was right with his breast friendship with the US president.

After the choice of Republican and the announcement that Musk would lead to an efficiency, the share prices of his companies exploded. At the all-time high of the Tesla share, it was worth almost $ 480. The car manufacturer’s value rose to $ 1.5 trillion.

Almost three months later, one thing is certain: Tesla was rated too high. The stock is in a continuous descent. In the meantime, the company’s value has halved to $ 715 billion. In addition to the misjudgment of the value, the trigger may have been more escapades. After the inauguration of Trump, he showed something in front of a cheering crowd that could be interpreted as a Hitler greeting.

And even if the tech billionaire then struggled to make his critics ridiculous, for the first time there was something hanging on the man who normally has the sovereignty (at least on his platform X).

He may often dominate the public discourse, but a Elon Musk has no handling against one thing: the lack of sales. In Germany, for example, Tesla sales figures collapsed by more than 70 percent. On Monday alone, the share fell by 15 percent. Crisis mood at Musk. This was even necessary to release Trump to publish a tirade, “radical left insane”, Tesla boycotted to harm Musk. Trump personally plan to buy a Tesla to support Musk. It is very questionable whether this alone saves the stock market course.

This is not Musk’s only construction site in this crisis week. Almost simultaneously with the news about the crashing share price, the billionaire himself reported that there were massive cyber attacks on its platform X. Thousands of users complain about problems with login.

In this regard, Musk himself saw himself in the middle of a huge conspiracy: the problems at Tesla, the cyber attack on X, protests against his authority – all of the hanging together. The cyber attacks assumed IP addresses from the “area of ​​Ukraine”, said Musk at the TV station Fox Business Network. Because of the scope of the attacks, he suspects a large group or a country behind it. He did not provide any documents.

Either way: it is currently burning in Musks at several corners. The tech billionaire suddenly has to retrain for firefighter. And that raises a completely new question for him: Can Elon Musk crisis?

With material from the dpa news agency.