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Musk’s “ingratitude” tweet might be the most costly social media post of all time

By the end of the day, the Tesla CEO lost $153 billion from his company’s market cap and $33.9 billion of his personal wealth.

J. Edward Moreno

6/6/25 11:44AM

Unless you were on a social media cleanse yesterday, you probably saw that the world’s wealthiest man and the president of the United States are no longer friends. They made that clear by exchanging barbs that started off with a policy disagreement and ended up very personal.

It appeared the gloves came off when Musk said Trump would not be in office if it weren’t for him.

“Such ingratitude,” Musk posted on X, his social media site. Of course, the president responded through his own social media site, Truth Social.

By the end of the day, Tesla had lost $153 billion of its market cap and Musk had lost $33.9 billion of his personal wealth, as the company’s ability to continue benefiting from its CEO’s coziness with the government became unknown.

When you stack it up against other well-known posts that destroyed lots of shareholder value, the “ingratitude” post appears to go down as the most costly social media post ever, by far:

In 2022, a fake Twitter account posing as Eli Lilly posted that “insulin is free now.” The company lost $15.6 billion in market value.

In 2018, Kylie Jenner posted a modest critique of Snap that led the company to lose $1.3 billion in market value. (At the time, the company had just changed its app layout and it appeared to be unpopular with more people than just the reality TV star.)

still love you tho snap ... my first love
— Kylie Jenner (@KylieJenner) February 21, 2018

On 2017, Trump tweeted that Amazon was hurting tax-paying retailers and costing jobs, causing it to lose as much as $6 billion in market value during intraday trading. It closed $2.1 billion slimmer.

Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

Not included on this list are tweets that destroyed and then quickly recovered market value, of which there are many. I mean, how could we forget this?

US stocks end volatile week on a positive note

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both ended well in the green, while the Russell 2000 suffered a loss.

Toby Bochan10/17/25

Matt Phillips10/17/25

Margins, and selling the news: analysts look to explain Oracle’s tumble

The somewhat counterintuitive tumble in Oracle shares continued into afternoon trading Friday, despite Wall Street analysts’ more or less favorable reaction to Oracle’s investor day presentation Thursday, where executives said the company’s AI cloud business would eventually sport margins of between 30% and 40%, far better than the figures reported by The Information back on September 7.

And yet, the stock is on its way to its worst day in the last six months. What gives?

Gil Lauria, who covers Oracle for D.A. Davidson & Co. — who has it at “hold” with a $300 price target — has a theory, telling Sherwood News:

“Investors are disappointed that the entire growth acceleration in Oracle is from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business, and that Oracle expects the rest of the business to grow low single digits.

The other disappointment came from Oracle acknowledging that the GPU rental business only had 30-40% gross margins, far lower than the 80% gross margins for the rest of the business.”

Other analysts we’ve chatted with on background say they’re not convinced the margin story is the source of today’s slump, suggesting the also plausible explanation that the drop might just be a sign traders bought the stock ahead of the presentation to analysts on Thursday anticipating positive announcements, and now they’re selling simply selling the news.

Analysts generally like what they heard from Oracle, but shares are down

Gil Lauria, who covers Oracle for D.A. Davidson & Co. — who has it at “hold” with a $300 price target — has a theory, telling Sherwood News:

“Investors are disappointed that the entire growth acceleration in Oracle is from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business, and that Oracle expects the rest of the business to grow low single digits.

The other disappointment came from Oracle acknowledging that the GPU rental business only had 30-40% gross margins, far lower than the 80% gross margins for the rest of the business.”

Jon Keegan10/17/25

Analysts generally like what they heard from Oracle, but shares are down

The big news out from the Oracle AI World conference was broadly positive: that margins on cloud infrastructure can be as high as 35%, and that the company predicts $166 billion in infrastructure revenue by 2030.

And in the wake of that news, today UBS raised its price target for Oracle shares to $380 from $360, saying they are undervalued.

But investors appear to have some concerns about Oracle’s huge capex plans, which are fueled by huge AI infrastructure deals with OpenAI and Meta, as shares dropped over 7% in Friday trading.

Analysts have pointed to Oracle’s high cash burn as it pursues its AI build-out and potential financing needs as flies in the ointment that could blunt the impact of the company’s strong longer-term growth forecasts.

On Friday, Jefferies analysts wrote:

“Questions remain about ORCL’s capex requirements to meet growing demand, as there was no forward-looking commentary on capex at the Analyst Day. Capex will need to ramp in line with [Oracle cloud infrastructure] revenue growth, raising concerns about ORCL’s financing options to support this expansion.”

However, if that’s the reason why the stock is getting hit today, it would mark a distinct change in how investors are evaluating the AI trade. Companies have tended to be increasingly rewarded for their aggressive capex commitments to enhance the boom, based on optimism that investments in this would-be revolutionary technology will bear fruit.

Friday’s dip comes on the back of a strong run leading up to the yesterday’s investor conference, fueled by a flurry of AI headlines. Oracle shares have gained over 18% in the past three months and more than 70% so far this year, well outpacing the Nasdaq’s approximately 7% and 16% rise over the same time periods.

Matt Phillips10/17/25

AST SpaceMobile drops after Barclays cuts rating to “underweight”

AST SpaceMobile, which provides cellular services from space, dove in early trading after Barclays analysts cut their rating on the shares to “underweight” (essentially a sell) from “overweight” (or a buy), citing “excessive” valuation on the still money-burning company. The fact that analysts went from “buy” to “sell” — with no momentary stop at a “hold” or “neutral” rating — makes it a fairly rare “double downgrade.”

They wrote:

“Valuation has run ahead of fundamentals... In our last update, we increased our price target from $38 to $60 as we took a more constructive view on pricing; we found it supportive that TMUS/Starlink launched a text only service for $10 per month and believe that AST products which will be richer (text, call, broadband) could see higher prices points. Since then the stock price has doubled from $48 to $95.7.”

With the shares up almost 120% over the last month through Thursday, and a price-to-forward-sales ratio of 140x — the Nasdaq Composite is around 5x — the stock might be due for a cooling-off period.