Debate
13:23
The electric carmaker’s popularity is not as authentic as it may seem
by Greg Barker
Elon Musk can’t stay out of the news. Today, it was revealed that the tech billionaire offered to buy Twitter for $41.4 billion, while earlier this week, the LA Times published a contentious piece about Tesla, punching yet another hole in Musk’s ‘tech genius’ narrative. “Twitter bots helped build the cult of Elon Musk and Tesla,” reads the headline, ‘but who’s creating them?”
The piece was referring to a recent study by University of Maryland School of Business professor David A. Kirsch. He concluded that social media bots “played a significant part” in securing Tesla’s status as a meme stock, which in the cheap money era guaranteed to propel the EV company’s valuation to loftier levels than anything “traditional financial analysis” could quantify.
Kirsch’s report went on to note that out of 1.4 million tweets quoting the hashtag #TSLA posted in the last decade, 23% were bot-generated. Each time one of 186 Tesla-related bot accounts’ was created, a 2% rise in Tesla’s stock price followed. Other bots served a similar purpose for tech stocks in general, with Apple and Amazon benefiting greatly. Still, bots for these two companies were not playing a boosterish role, unlike the Tesla bots, which enabled Musk to sell equity while his…
