The dangers of Twitter

This is Joseph, stealing Mark's normal beat.

It seems Elon Musk tweeted that he had buyers lined up to take his company private at $420 per share.  Really.

The surprise tweet comes as Mr. Musk’s long-combative stance against Tesla’s short sellers has grown testier in recent months. He has repeatedly used Twitter to chide investors who are betting against his company, sometimes offering vague positive outlooks for the company that seemed to boost the stock, hurting short sellers’ positions.

This highlights one of the challenges of social media, as it is not impossible that this news could affect short sales.  So it is very, very important that he really have this funding lined up. 

Josh Marshall points out that this could go wrong. 

I think that this is a challenge of social media platforms, where this type of news can be rapidly sent out without the normal slow vetting of traditional media outlets.  This might all be fine, but it seems to create a lot of possible problems for Tesla, which may not have been obvious at the moment that the tweet was made.