It was May of 2018. “Avengers: Infinity War” was in theaters. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle got married, which people cared about for some reason. Mike Pence was the vice president, and no one had tried to hang him yet.
As for me, there I was, hustling as an associate litigator out in the wild with something to prove. I was still a few months away from penning my first substantive column for this site, building street cred not only as a lawyer but as an investor, when I made a little gamble on a few shares of an electric automaker called Tesla.
And a gamble it was. If you’ve followed this column from the beginning, you know that I don’t consider buying individual stocks to be much more economically productive than wandering a casino floor. Tesla was no exception: in 2018, the company was still two years away from achieving its first full year of net income, and most of that from selling regulatory credits to other automakers rather than from actually selling vehicles.
At the time, however, I considered it worth the financial risk to invest a little money in companies like Tesla as a sort of moral imperative. Since I am not a dolt, I accept the reality of climate change. For those like me with a little extra money to invest, and an appetite for risk, helping along the only American car company that was actually making electric vehicles cool seemed a worthwhile pursuit for the planet if not necessarily for one’s stock portfolio.
Then there was the matter of Tesla’s young, promising CEO Elon Musk. Now just hang on, hear me out before you start launching rotten vegetables in my direction.
Remember, this was early 2018 Elon Musk! What the man actually believes, if anything, is incredibly difficult to ascertain at this point. There is a whole (lengthy) Wikipedia page dedicated solely to Musk’s shifting, shimmering, often contradictory views.
Things did not seem so complicated in 2018. Yes, Musk was, even then, an incredibly rich person (he wouldn’t become the world’s wealthiest person until 2021). Yet, stories kept coming out about how he lived like a monk. He spoke out passionately about the risks of climate change. He had publicly supported the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. For a CEO, the guy was pretty likable. Charismatic, even. He was daring to do with his companies what everyone else said was impossible.
Then the infamous 420 tweet happened. Musk’s relationship with the musician Grimes fell apart. His oldest child (nearly tied for oldest with her twin, to be precise) came out as transgender and disowned him because of the way he’d treated her. He was sucked into the darkest corners of Twitter during the pandemic. The ketamine, the unsatisfactorily explained black eyes, the repeated unfunny attempts at comedy, working for Donald Trump to pointlessly destroy the lives of thousands of federal workers while he waved around a chainsaw on stage like a lunatic; something — a lot of things — went terribly, terribly wrong.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s share price during this period was as volatile as its CEO’s life. At first, and for quite a while, it looked like I was going to lose it all. Then, right about the time when Musk was revealing his rightward pivot, the stock soared. It cratered after that, only to ascend again, creating a chart reminiscent of the jagged EKG readout of a patient whose heart is about to explode.
Of course, I changed too over the past seven years. We all did. For instance, a number of my early ATL columns focused largely on praising Musk. Then somewhere along the line I found myself more often defending him. Until I finally just settled on the skewering he deserves.
Still, I can’t complain about the returns on my Tesla investment over the course of this story arc. If you’re wondering how I did, well, you can take my initial capital from May of 2018, multiple it by 23, and you’ll come out almost to the penny at where I’m at after liquidating my position on Monday.
I’m happy with the money. You know what pleases me even more than that though? I like the person I am today better than the one I was in May of 2018. I don’t think, if he’s really, brutally honest, Musk could say the same.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post So Long, Farewell, Elon Musk: After 7 Long Years As A Tesla Shareholder, I’ve Liquidated My Position appeared first on Above the Law.
It was May of 2018. “Avengers: Infinity War” was in theaters. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle got married, which people cared about for some reason. Mike Pence was the vice president, and no one had tried to hang him yet.
As for me, there I was, hustling as an associate litigator out in the wild with something to prove. I was still a few months away from penning my first substantive column for this site, building street cred not only as a lawyer but as an investor, when I made a little gamble on a few shares of an electric automaker called Tesla.
And a gamble it was. If you’ve followed this column from the beginning, you know that I don’t consider buying individual stocks to be much more economically productive than wandering a casino floor. Tesla was no exception: in 2018, the company was still two years away from achieving its first full year of net income, and most of that from selling regulatory credits to other automakers rather than from actually selling vehicles.
At the time, however, I considered it worth the financial risk to invest a little money in companies like Tesla as a sort of moral imperative. Since I am not a dolt, I accept the reality of climate change. For those like me with a little extra money to invest, and an appetite for risk, helping along the only American car company that was actually making electric vehicles cool seemed a worthwhile pursuit for the planet if not necessarily for one’s stock portfolio.
Then there was the matter of Tesla’s young, promising CEO Elon Musk. Now just hang on, hear me out before you start launching rotten vegetables in my direction.
Remember, this was early 2018 Elon Musk! What the man actually believes, if anything, is incredibly difficult to ascertain at this point. There is a whole (lengthy) Wikipedia page dedicated solely to Musk’s shifting, shimmering, often contradictory views.
Things did not seem so complicated in 2018. Yes, Musk was, even then, an incredibly rich person (he wouldn’t become the world’s wealthiest person until 2021). Yet, stories kept coming out about how he lived like a monk. He spoke out passionately about the risks of climate change. He had publicly supported the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. For a CEO, the guy was pretty likable. Charismatic, even. He was daring to do with his companies what everyone else said was impossible.
Then the infamous 420 tweet happened. Musk’s relationship with the musician Grimes fell apart. His oldest child (nearly tied for oldest with her twin, to be precise) came out as transgender and disowned him because of the way he’d treated her. He was sucked into the darkest corners of Twitter during the pandemic. The ketamine, the unsatisfactorily explained black eyes, the repeated unfunny attempts at comedy, working for Donald Trump to pointlessly destroy the lives of thousands of federal workers while he waved around a chainsaw on stage like a lunatic; something — a lot of things — went terribly, terribly wrong.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s share price during this period was as volatile as its CEO’s life. At first, and for quite a while, it looked like I was going to lose it all. Then, right about the time when Musk was revealing his rightward pivot, the stock soared. It cratered after that, only to ascend again, creating a chart reminiscent of the jagged EKG readout of a patient whose heart is about to explode.
Of course, I changed too over the past seven years. We all did. For instance, a number of my early ATL columns focused largely on praising Musk. Then somewhere along the line I found myself more often defending him. Until I finally just settled on the skewering he deserves.
Still, I can’t complain about the returns on my Tesla investment over the course of this story arc. If you’re wondering how I did, well, you can take my initial capital from May of 2018, multiple it by 23, and you’ll come out almost to the penny at where I’m at after liquidating my position on Monday.
I’m happy with the money. You know what pleases me even more than that though? I like the person I am today better than the one I was in May of 2018. I don’t think, if he’s really, brutally honest, Musk could say the same.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].
