The influence of Elon Musk’s tweets on the stock market and company stock prices can be compared with statements on Donald Trump’s social network: like the 45th President of America, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX could arouse investors’ interest in a particular company with one word. And if for other companies his statements most often led to a rise in quotes, then for Tesla, almost all the posts of its founder worsened the financial situation. Musk often regretted what he wrote about his own companies and admitted in interviews with various media that he did not expect negative reactions to the tweets.
Tweeted: how Trump's statements on Twitter affected markets, companies and fortunes
Musk returned to his Twitter account two days after he announced he would stop running it for a while. The billionaire's first tweets after his return led to an increase in the value of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency by almost 60%.
Advertising on Forbes
Replaced Samsung batteries
Amid expectations that the development of the Tesla Model 3 will be completed, rumors have appeared in the press that Samsung will become the supplier of batteries for the company’s new electric car. The founder of Tesla suppressed the rumors.
What Musk wrote
“I would like to clarify that in terms of batteries for the Model 3, Tesla works exclusively with Panasonic. News that states otherwise is false” (June 8, 2016)
How the market reacted
Musk's tweet sent shares of Samsung's SDI division, which creates displays, batteries and accumulators, down 8.02%. The company's capitalization fell by $580 million. At the same time, Panasonic grew by 3.68% and added $800 million in value.
Elon Musk's influence on the Dogecoin rate
From February to July 2022, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, mentioned Dogecoin 7 times in his tweets, and also published memes with this coin. We will not take into account memes, but we will analyze each informational tweet and check their impact on the coin price.
First tweet dated February 10, 2022. In it, Elon Musk wrote that he bought Dogecoin for his son. After it, the price of Doge increased by 8.6%: from $0.07 to $0.076. This is less than 10%, so the tweet did not affect the price of the coin.
Dogecoin rate February 10, 2022
The second tweet was published on the night of February 14-15, 2022. In it, Musk wrote that he would like to see the majority of long-term Dogecoin holders sell their coins. And he added that he was ready to pay just to see their wallets empty. It seems investors really started selling Doge, as after these messages the price dropped from $0.063 to $0.051. This is 19%, so the tweet influenced the price of the coin.
Dogecoin rate February 14-15, 2022
Third tweet dated March 15, 2022. In it, Musk announced the sale of NFT for Dogecoin, but after 2 days he changed his mind and decided not to sell it. On the day of publication, March 15, the price of Doge increased by 2.1%: from $0.0573 to $0.0585. This is less than 10%, so the tweet did not affect the rate.
Dogecoin rate March 15-16, 2022
The fourth tweet, dated March 17, 2022, was a response to the previous one. Musk wrote that he had changed his mind and did not plan to sell NFTs. After this publication, the price of Doge decreased by 3% - from $0.0584 to $0.0566, that is, Musk had no influence on the rate.
Dogecoin rate March 17, 2022
Fifth tweet dated May 11, 2022. Inside it was a vote to add Dogecoin as a new payment method at Tesla. 78% of Musk on Twitter voted “For”, 22% “Against”. The price of Doge that day decreased by 5.8% from $0.052 to $0.049. The tweet did not affect the rate.
Dogecoin rate May 11, 2022
Sixth tweet dated June 28, 2022. In it, Musk commented on the news about changes in commissions on the Dogecoin network with the words: “It is important to support.” The price of the coin increased by 2%: from $0.256 to $0.261. The growth is less than 10%, so Musk did not affect the rate.
Dogecoin rate June 28, 2022
Seventh tweet dated July 1, 2022. In it, Musk denied rumors that it would be possible to mine Doge on a Tesla supercomputer. Within 24 hours after publication, the value of the coin fell by 7.4%: from $0.258 to $0.239. This is less than 10%, so the tweet did not affect the Dogecoin price.
Dogecoin price July 1, 2022
Only 1 out of 7 tweets changed the Dogecoin price by more than 10%. This means that Elon Musk does not influence the rate of the coin and you should not rely on his Twitter.
Recommended material
In 2022, thanks to Elon Musk's tweets, Dogecoin became incredibly popular. In the material we talk about the prospects of the coin, as well as whether DOGE is a worthwhile investment or a “bubble”.
Jokes aside
On International April Fool's Day, Musk decided to make fun of his followers and published a series of tweets in which he announced Tesla's bankruptcy. Musk reported that the electric car manufacturer was hit by the US Bankruptcy Code (it does not exist), and ended it all with the words: “Elon was found passed out on a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by Teslakilla bottles, traces of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.”
What Musk wrote
“Despite strenuous attempts to make money, including a frantic massive Easter egg sale, we are sad to report that Tesla is absolutely and completely bankrupt. It’s so bankrupt that you won’t even believe it” (April 1, 2022)
Blue chip club: how getting into the S&P 500 will affect Tesla shares
How the market reacted
Investors didn’t get the joke: Tesla shares fell 5.1% following trading on April 2. Perhaps the tweet would have been regarded as humorous if the company had not previously announced the recall of 123,000 Model S due to problems with power steering, the rating agency Moody's would not have downgraded the company's credit rating to B3 with a negative outlook, and in a couple of days Before this, a Model X driven by Autopilot would not have crashed into a highway guardrail on a California highway, killing the driver.
The post that deprived Musk of his post
In 2022, the billionaire tweeted about his readiness to buy Tesla shares.
What Musk wrote
“I’m thinking about withdrawing Tesla from the stock exchange at a share price of $420. Funding secured" (August 7, 2022)
Ocean of lies: the mysterious story of Nikola, who wanted but could not become the second Tesla
Advertising on Forbes
How the market reacted
At that time, Tesla shares were priced around $350, but after the tweet, the quotes shot up and added 11% on the same day. But the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also responded to the tweet: a case was opened against Musk. The regulator considered that Musk “misled investors” with his message. The company's shareholders filed a lawsuit against the businessman.
According to rough estimates by the analytical firm S3 Partners, the losses of traders with open short positions against Tesla exceeded $1 billion.
As a result, Musk got away with resigning from his post as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Tesla, a fine of $20 million (another $20 million was paid by Tesla) and an obligation to coordinate all communications about the company in advance (which he did not agree with). In response, the businessman said that the number of likes on this post was worth it.
A joint on a joint
After a tweet about his readiness to buy back Tesla shares and news about SEC claims, the capitalization of Musk’s company fell by $20 billion. And the businessman only contributed to the fall in quotes. So, after he smoked marijuana live on stand-up comedian Joe Rogan’s show, Tesla shares lost 10%. An ironic tweet about the regulator that Musk made in early October 2018 further aggravated the situation.
What Musk wrote
Advertising on Forbes
“Just wanted to point out that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission (SEC) is doing an incredible job! And the name change fits right in!” (October 4, 2018)
Elon Musk's battle with the SEC ended in a truce. What did the billionaire agree to?
How the market reacted
Musk wrote this tweet two hours after a federal judge in New York demanded that the SEC and the head of Tesla justify the feasibility of the pre-trial agreement that they entered into at the end of September. The market immediately reacted to this tweet and Tesla shares fell by 5%. The fall continued the next day; the situation was stabilized only after a few weeks. Later, in an interview with The Verge, Musk said that he did not renege on his words. “I want to emphasize: I have no respect for the SEC,” he told the publication. At the same time, he added that he would comply with the terms of the agreement out of respect for American justice.
Elon Musk's Twitter in telegram and with translation into Russian
I want to share one of my crafts, perhaps it will also be useful to someone. In this article, I will share what I did to read Musk's Twitter account in a convenient place for me and with the translation of English tweets into Russian at hand.
Problem
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that I want to start regularly reading this or that blog, but if it’s not in the zone of convenient or habitual access (unfortunately, all of Twitter is like that for me, I can’t help it, I’m not a Twitter reader), then I forget about it pretty quickly. Even worse, if the blog is in another language, there is an additional problem when technical terms or colloquial jargon make it difficult to understand the meaning. In fact, such “obstacles” usually lead to what one would like to do, but somehow doesn’t do it.
Idea
Now I make custom software robots that process news flows on social networks online, filter them, select the most interesting and cited ones, and transfer them to the customer. I thought why not use my skills and make my life easier on the problem described above. To do this, you just need to go to Twitter every few minutes, pick up new messages, run them through the translator and send them to the Telegram channel. It seems nothing complicated.
Underwater rocks
The first problem I encountered was that freelancers from whom I tried to order a piece of code that directly downloads new posts from Twitter, everyone refused to fulfill the order. They took it straight away, and then one’s computer broke down, another had other things to do, and the third changed his mind at the last moment.
The second problem is Twitter’s refusal to provide access to the API in the cases I described. That is, the only option left is to engage in web scraping. Well.
The third problem was that it turns out that quite a lot of manual work is required to convert a post from Twitter to Telegram format and make it look decent. In particular, pictures, link previews, mentions, etc.
Technologies
I decided to try it myself and started googling something like “parsing twitter without API”. There were quite a lot of solutions, I’ll say right away that the twint solution is an open source library that is quite workable and suited my task.
In order to translate text from English into Russian, I was initially going to use google translate, but I realized that it had a limited number of free translations, so I decided that I would try to use the only neural network I knew for translating from English into Russian, fairseq, from Facebook AI Research. The quality of the translation seemed quite acceptable to me in terms of understanding what the essence of the tweet was, although it was not perfect.
I wrapped all this in a script in the python programming language and launched it for permanent work on my server.
Code examples
To collect data from Twitter without using dedicated developer access, logins, passwords and APIs, you need to do the following:
Install twint library
pip3 install twint
Run format code
twint -u -o output.csv —csv —since 2020-01-01 —retweets
There is an important point here that all this is launched from under bash, despite the fact that the library has a python API (and it is written in Python), but at the same time I spent quite a lot of time and it did not start at all. Moreover, if I run it from the command line, everything except automatic translation of posts worked for me.
From the functionality that the library has, I’ll also note:
- Ability to search user tweets by keyword
twint -u username -s pineapple
- Ability to find user tweets indicating phone numbers and emails
twint -u username —email —phone
- Search for tweets around a specific location
twint -g="48.880048,2.385939,1km" -o file.csv --csv
- Saving to Elasticsearch or SQLite
twint -u username -es localhost:9200 twint -u username —database tweets.db
- Saving followers, subscriptions and favorites for a user
twint -u username —followers twint -u username —following twint -u username —favorites
The data is saved in a csv file, which contains fields such as (I will list those that I used myself, since there are many of them and most carry little information):
id — message identifier
conversation_id - conversation identifier
created_at — date the message was created
tweet - message text
mentions - mentions of Twitter users (list of dictionaries)
urls - links inserted according to Twitter rules (for example to YouTube)
photos - links to pictures
link - link to tweet
reply_to - list of dictionaries with users whose tweets are replied to by tweet
The library also has the ability to translate into another language, but it didn’t work for me at all. Actually for this reason I was looking for another opportunity. I found, as mentioned above, an open-source development from Facebook AI Research - the fairseq library, in which you can download neuron weights for translation, in particular from English to Russian and vice versa.
pip install hydra-core
In total it was necessary to install:
pip install torch pip install hydra-core==1.0.0 omegaconf==2.0.1 pip install fastBPE regex requests sacremoses subword_nmt
In general, the installation manual and example of use are on the pytorch website, but as you can see, mine is slightly different. In order to make a translation, you can use the following piece from the example - it is quite working:
import torch # Compare the results with English-Russian round-trip translation: en2ru = torch.hub.load('pytorch/fairseq', 'transformer.wmt19.en-ru.single_model', tokenizer='moses', bpe=' fastbpe') ru2en = torch.hub.load('pytorch/fairseq', 'transformer.wmt19.ru-en.single_model', tokenizer='moses', bpe='fastbpe') paraphrase = ru2en.translate( en2ru.translate ('PyTorch Hub is an awesome interface!') ) assert paraphrase == 'PyTorch is a great interface!'
It translates twice and checks whether the result matches the original version. At the first launch, a large neuron is downloaded from the torch hub servers, which works quite quickly on the processor.
In general, apart from how to use the libraries, I still have quite a lot of code to make the received messages quite readable, but these are the details of my application.
How to use
It looks like this now. Every tweet and retweet on Elon Musk’s main Twitter page is passed through a translator, links and pictures from the post are selected, then all this is saved into a post in the Telegram channel. It looks like this
In total, I got a telegram channel called “Twitter of Elon Musk” (subscribe, I will be pleased that someone else needs it, there will be an additional incentive to support it in the future), in which you can
1) read new and old posts by Elon Musk
2) see the translation of the text into Russian
3) follow the link to the original post on Twitter
And all this without registration and SMS.
If you found this article interesting, please upvote it (so more people will see it) and subscribe to my blog on Telegram, where I talk about all my experiments every day. If you want to solve a similar problem for your business, write in a personal message.
Revaluation
US authorities demanded that Musk approve all financial indicators of Tesla from the company's lawyer. He reluctantly agreed. However, this did not stop the businessman from expressing his own opinion, even regarding the cost of Tesla.
Advertising on Forbes
What Musk wrote
"Tesla stock price is too high for my liking" (May 1, 2020)
How the creator of Bond's car and his wife became billionaires, challenging Elon Musk
How the market reacted
Despite the pandemic, Tesla shares grew, and a decent quarterly report reflected an additional acceleration in the quotes - they rose to $855. But the day after Musk’s tweet, Tesla shares collapsed by 10.3% to $701.32 per day. The company lost about $14 billion in market capitalization, and the founder's fortune decreased by $2.8 billion.
Advertising on Forbes
Analysis rules
We will analyze Elon Musk's tweets about Bitcoin and Dogecoin cryptocurrencies. If within 24 hours after publication the coin rate changed by 10% or more, then the tweet influenced the rate. And if it is less than 10%, this is a normal daily change for cryptocurrencies and Musk did not influence the price with his publication.
If more than half of the tweets about the coin changed its course, then Musk’s Twitter is worth following and it really influences the market. And if it’s less, these are just loud headlines for the media, which you shouldn’t pay attention to when trading.
Error Signal
On January 7, Musk wrote a short message on Twitter in response to the change in privacy rules at WhatsApp, which decided to transfer the data of its users to Facebook. In the post, he was referring to the Signal messenger, which positions itself as secure and private.
What Musk wrote
"Use Signal" (January 7, 2022)
Winners and losers: Which billionaire made or lost the most in 2022
How the market reacted
Advertising on Forbes
Some investors decided to make money on Musk’s tweet; after the publication, the price of Signal Advance shares began to rise sharply. As a result, over three trading days, the company’s shares gained more than 5100%, and its market capitalization reached $390 million, Bloomberg wrote. At the same time, Signal Advance has no relation to the messenger allegedly mentioned by Musk - the company produces medical products. After January 11, the company's share price began to decline.
Elon Musk and Bitcoin: a brief history of a complex relationship
February 2022: Cautious optimism
Elon Musk first spoke about cryptocurrencies not on Twitter, but during a podcast in February 2022. He said, in part: “I think Bitcoin is a great idea, but I’m not sure Tesla should get involved in crypto. We promote the use of renewable energy, and one of the problems with cryptocurrencies is the high energy consumption for computing.” At the same time, Musk added: “Paper money is gradually becoming a thing of the past, and crypto is a much better way to transfer value than pieces of paper.”
Market effect: almost none. Probably not enough people listened to the podcast, and there was no such thing as the “Musk effect” yet.
January 29, 2022: #bitcoin in profile
Musk simply added the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter bio and posted a cryptic tweet: “Looking back, it was inevitable.” This was enough for the crypto community.
Market effect: short-term but violent rally: +20% per day.
February 8, 2022: Tesla bought Bitcoin
Tesla announced the purchase of military-technical exchange worth $1.5 billion, as well as plans to accept payments in bitcoins.
Market effect: the rate soared 15% to $44,200.
March 24, 2022: Tesla accepts BTC
“Tesla can now be bought with Bitcoin. Tesla uses only internal and open-source software and operates its own Bitcoin nodes. The received bitcoins will be stored in the form of bitcoins, without conversion to fiat currency.”
Market effect: rally from $54,000 to $56,500.
Source: Yahoo Finance
April 27, 2021 : Musk did not sell his Bitcoin
Dave Portnoy: Am I right? Elon Musk buys Bitcoin, pumps it, the price rises. Then he resets it and gets a ton of money. (...)".
Elon Musk: “No, that’s wrong. I didn't sell my bitcoins. Tesla sold 10% of its BTC to prove its liquidity as an alternative to cash on its balance sheet.”
Market effect: plus 4.7% – from $53,100 to $55,600.
May 13, 2022: Tesla no longer accepts BTC (but doesn't sell it either)
“Tesla has suspended selling cars for Bitcoin. We are concerned about the rapidly increasing consumption of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions - in particular coal, which surpasses all other fuels in terms of polluting emissions.
Cryptocurrency is a good idea in many ways and we believe it has a bright future, but that future cannot be allowed to come at such a high cost to the environment.
Tesla does not intend to sell the Bitcoin it owns, and we will resume using it for transactions when mining shifts to cleaner energy sources. We are also exploring other cryptocurrencies that consume less than 1% of the energy per transaction compared to Bitcoin."
Market effect: Of all Musk's tweets, this was the most damning: the price fell from $58,000 to $42,000, or 28%.
May 16, 2022: Tesla appears to have sold additional BTC after all
Mr. Whale: “Bitcoin fans will be wringing their hands every other quarter when they find out that Tesla sold all of its remaining Bitcoin. Considering how much dirt gets thrown at Elon Musk, I don’t blame him.”
Elon Musk: “Exactly.”
Market effect: Although Musk's comment did not directly confirm that the company had sold BTC, the public understood it as such. The rate fell to its lowest level since February.
May 17, 2022: no, I still didn’t sell it
Bitcoin Archive: “Bitcoin has fallen 20% since Elon Musk started writing all sorts of crap about it. No wonder people are mad."
Elon Musk: “Let me be clear: Tesla did not sell Bitcoin.”
Market effect: the fall slowed and Bitcoin managed to consolidate at $45,000.
May 24, 2022: Mining shows promise
“I talked to Bitcoin miners from North America. They promised to publish data on current and planned use of renewable energy and ask miners around the world to do the same. Looks potentially promising."
Market effect: the price of military-technical cooperation increased by 4%.
June 3: broken heart
This time Musk outdid himself: he didn’t even write anything about Bitcoin, but simply posted a sad emoji and a picture hinting at a breakup.
“She: I remember saying that if you quote a Linkin Park song again, I will leave you. But I have another one."
Him: So it didn’t matter in the end?
Market effect: minus 5%
June 13, 2022: Tesla may begin accepting BTC again in the future
CoinTelegraph: “Have you seen it? Elon Musk got it again - for what this time? Sygnia CEO Magda Wierzycka attacked him, saying: “What is happening with Bitcoin is the result of price manipulation by one extremely powerful and influential person.”
Elon Musk: “That’s not true. Tesla sold 10% of its BTS to prove that they can be easily liquidated if necessary, without putting pressure on the market. When there is confirmation that miners are using a significant amount (50%) of clean energy with a positive outlook for the future, Tesla will begin accepting Bitcoin again."
Market effect: $4,000 jump, from $35,000 to $39,000.
June 25: mysterious joke about Bitcoin maximalists
“How many Bitcoin maximalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
"Not funny!" – Bitcoin maximalists
It's hard to say what Musk meant. Most likely, he was simply making fun of the so-called maximalists who believe that BTC is the only true cryptocurrency, and all altcoins are evil. Since Musk himself is known to be partial to Dogecoin, his mockery of maximalists is not surprising.
Market effect: insignificant. Someone in the community even joked that this was Musk’s first tweet about Bitcoin that didn’t upset the market.
"Hey, you king, you will succeed"
On January 13, Musk posted a meme showing an anime-style girl from the musical game The Idolmaster, which later became the basis for an animated series and a line of toys. The franchise has been the main source of income for Bandai Namco Holdings in recent years, Bloomberg wrote.
What Musk wrote
“Hey, you, king, you will succeed.” (January 13, 2021)
Why Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world
Advertising on Forbes
How the market reacted
14:00 Moscow time Musk's tweet received almost 380,000 likes and almost 90,000 shares. Shares of the Japanese toy manufacturer rose 4.4% on the Tokyo stock exchange, Bloomberg noted.
Raising game
On January 29, 2022, Musk tweeted a photo of the interior of the new Plaid Model S sedan and mentioned the Cyberpunk game in a comment thread about the car.
What Musk wrote
“It [the car] can play Cyberpunk.” “By the way, the cyberpunk aesthetic is incredible” (January 29, 2022)
Advertising on Forbes
How a programmer from Ukraine and ex-partner of Musk became a new dollar billionaire
How the market reacted
On December 10, 2022, the Polish studio CD Projekt, creator of the popular Witcher video game series, released the computer game Cyberpunk 2077. Amid the excitement, the developer’s shares rose in price by more than 50% even before the game’s release, and the company’s founders became dollar billionaires. On December 18, Sony recalled the game from the store and stated that it would return money to customers who were dissatisfied - Cyberpunk could not be played on previous generations of consoles. From December 5 to December 11, the company’s securities fell by 28%, and the fortune of the studio’s founders, Marcin Iwiński and Michal Kiciński, decreased by a total of $700 million. The shares became popular with investors as short-term securities after the audience’s negative reaction to the game, CNBC wrote .
Cyberbug: how the release of the most long-awaited game of the year became a disaster for fans and investors
After Elon Musk expressed his admiration for the Cyberpunk game on Twitter, shares of the developer company jumped in price by 12.6%.
Advertising on Forbes
The house that Musk built
Another curiosity turned out to be Musk’s tweet after he announced his appearance on the social network Clubhouse. Investors rushed to buy shares of Clubhouse Media Group, a company developing “content production houses.” Musk was referring to the developer of the Clubhouse app, a private company that is not listed on the stock exchange.
What Musk wrote
"On Clubhouse tonight at 10:00 pm LA time" (January 31, 2022)
Networking on steroids: the main thing about the new social network Clubhouse, used by Elon Musk
How the market reacted
Advertising on Forbes
After this tweet, Clubhouse Media Group grew by more than 100%, the Financial Times reports. “The only problem here... is that this is not the same Clubhouse,” the publication writes, calling what happened the “Elon effect.”
So why doesn't Twitter pay any attention to Elon Musk's antics?
Twitter is a private corporation with a huge set of internal rules and procedures. Based on them, decisions are made to block the account of US President D. Trump. And at the same time, he allows the director of a corporation accused of fraud to maintain his page, whose tweets are bringing down the crypto market.
Why is he allowed to do this? There is no clear answer. It may be that Elon Musk, as they say, is “the guy on the board” in the club of techno-billionaires. In this regard, the story of another famous character in the crypto world, John McAfee .
His story is bright and tragic at the same time. He is a true rebel in the world of cryptocurrencies, who does not tolerate any dictate from authorities and regulators. Genius, inventor of the McAffee AntiVirus antivirus module, who had a fortune. And then he was left with almost nothing. John McAfee has been a fugitive for the past few years while being pursued by US authorities for possible securities crimes. Among the accusations was the promotion of cryptocurrencies on Twitter. Yes, he was accused of promoting cryptocurrencies using his Twitter account. According to the authorities, this is a crime.
As is known, on June 23, 2022, he was found dead in his cell while awaiting extradition to the United States. The official version is suicide.
