As Tesla shares plummeted in value at the end of last year, one investor who lost out was Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Speaker and Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.
Paul Pelosi lost more than $500,000 as Tesla dipped, according to Business Insider.
Tesla, of course, is currently lead by billionaire Elon Musk.
Pelosi reported that the final weeks of the year cost him $2.5 million as other investments lost money, including one in Salesforce, a cloud-based software company, that cost Pelosi nearly $734,000.
In March, Paul Pelosi had acquired $2 million worth of shares in Tesla, according to Forbes.
The losses come as the website Celebrity Net Worth estimated Paul Pelosi’s net worth to be $120 million.
Tesla stock had a rocky year in 2022, as noted by CNBC. As the year ended, its stock was down 73% from its record high in November 2021 and 69 percent over the course of 2022.
One of the reasons surrounding Tesla’s fall seemed to be Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the subsequent controversies surrounding the early days of the tech giant’s operation under Musk.
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives said Musk’s behavior has irked shareholders.
“At the same time that Tesla is cutting prices and inventory is starting to build globally in face of a likely global recession, Musk is viewed as ‘asleep at the wheel’ from a leadership perspective,” he wrote in late December.
We detailed in a note our Top 10 Actions Musk Needs to Do at Tesla/Twitter in 2023 in our opinion to change negative sentiment around the Tesla story. We remain long term bullish and OUTPERFORM on Tesla although Musk MUST start to change direction here we believe @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/gBuZAHxLXA
— Dan Ives (@DivesTech) December 29, 2022
Joshua White, a former economist for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, told CNBC there were other factors as well.
″Only some of the drop in Tesla’s value can be blamed on interest rates. Twitter overhang is one important component. China is another huge component. We still don’t know if China will be open all the way, and we see there is supply and demand pressure here in light of the increase in [COVID-19] cases and disruptions,” he said.
Musk has lost the trust of many, he said.
“He seems to sell equity in really large blocks, say ‘I’m done, and I’m not selling anymore.’ But talk is cheap. He says that and then sells more shares. So the more you say that and investors think he’s probably not done? The less confident they will be that the price is going to bounce back,” he said.
Another analyst said that the world has surpassed Tesla.
“The promise of Tesla was that at some point all of the cars in the world would be electric vehicles, and Tesla would play a major role in that,” said Efraim Benmelech, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, according to The New York Times.
Enter Ford and General Motors.
“Some of those companies have been around for 100 years. They have good engineers, good management. One should not underestimate the role that competition plays,” he said.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
