Shares of Tesla closed down 12.4% Tuesday. Though the company cranked out more than 1.3 million cars last year—more than one third of the Teslas ever manufactured—the company had promised to sell more. Cutting prices isn't working and CEO Elon Musk is still making a fool of himself on Twitter on a near-daily basis, rattling investors.
Musk has blamed Tesla's declining share price in part on rising interest rates. But critics point to his rocky $44 billion Twitter takeover as another big culprit. Musk sold tens of billions of dollars of his Tesla shares last year, in part, to finance the leveraged buyout. Some Wall Street analysts think that Tesla's deliveries miss, which followed aggressive discounting by Tesla in China and the US, spells trouble for the electric vehicle maker, but others see a buying opportunity.
