CNBC’s Fast Money discussed the fundamental’s of Elon Musk’s three major businesses on Thursday evening, focusing on the large dip Tesla’s stock has taken since late March.
Panelist Dan Nathan, a principal at RiskReversal Advisors, tore into Musk’s recent moves regarding Twitter, particularly the large amount of debt he took on to buy the social media company, and predicted Tesla’s stock will continue to slide.
“I actually think it’s going probably break 100, which is where I was in January, and my price target is 69 to the downside. That might seem a little aggressive on 4/20 on a day that it was just Elon day here,” Nathan said. Tesla’s stock was at $207 a share at the end of March and at $165 a share by the close of the market Friday.
“But to me, I think there’s something else going on here with Tesla,” Nathan continued, offering a brutal indictment of Musk’s business:
We know that he had been selling Tesla shares all year last year to fund his purchase of Twitter. We know that SpaceX has been for sale. He’s been looking to raise capital that way. You know, if this stock were to continue to go lower, if they are pushing out a manned trip to the moon, and that’s what the whole idea of this rocket launch was today on Twitter, they just marked down from $44 billion to $20 billion, got $13 billion.
This is not a generally very liquid person. He used to be able to get whatever lines that he wanted to, but now he’s got all these banks on the hook for this debt that he can’t service based on Twitter’s businesses. So to me, he might be entering the endgame here a little bit for being the CEO of all of these companies and being that levered.
And now when you look at this stock right here, it’s broken. The fundamentals have shifted. Not a single analyst on the street downgraded the stock. Okay. There’s plenty of price target downgrades.
They will be downgrading the stock lower. I’m just telling you that people over the next 3 to 6 months or so and that’s when you have a situation where, you know, who knows if he’s going to be in control of this company in the not so distant future, because it doesn’t seem like the “Elon aura” is playing out right now, the three biggest companies.
“So even putting aside this sort of pivot, because they did sort of pivot yesterday when they were saying we examine pricing on a weekly basis, we’re going to keep cutting prices to keep the volume up. That’s growth at all costs. That’s sort of a growth mode company for a company that may not necessarily be in growth mode right now. But putting that aside, you think the stock goes to 69 because he is to extend it, that there’s a liquidity issue,” replied host Melissa Lee.