(Ryan Collerd/Getty Images)

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?

Old electronic items tossed on ground for disposal, Hudson

Technology giants don’t look like they used to, as the asset-light era fades

Oracle and Meta are now some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the S&P 500, spending more than energy giants. I guess data really is the new oil?

David Crowther1h

Matt Phillips2h

Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

Matt Phillips3h

Intel sinks on news it will hang on to networking unit

Intel dropped in early trading Thursday after it disclosed plans to retain ownership of its networking unit following a strategic review of operations.

The unit, known as NEX, makes products like infrastructure processors, which do needed “housekeeping” tasks like running security checks, thereby freeing core Intel CPUs to do the higher-value operations. It also produces switches and controllers that manage and direct the flow of data to CPUs.

Intel Shelves Plans to Sell Networking Division After Review

Luke Kawa4h

Quantum computing stocks soar on return of bullish options bets

The calendar says December, but the price action is starting to look a lot more like September to me:

Quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are all up at least 7% as of 11:04 a.m. ET, buoyed by a wave of bullish options activity.

Nearly 50,000 calls in IonQ have already changed hands, well above the 20-day average for a full session, with activity concentrated in strikes from $50 to $55 in contracts that expire between Friday and mid-January. Its put/call ratio is near 0.2, versus an average of over 1 for the past 20 sessions.
More than 65,000 calls have traded in Rigetti, a hair shy of its full 20-day average. Like IonQ, options activity has a bullish tilt, with a put/call ratio of about 0.7 versus a 20-day average of roughly 1.2.
D-Wave, which received positive commentary from Evercore ISI on Wednesday, isn’t seeing call activity as elevated as its peers, but the options action is also very skewed toward the bull side, with a put/call ratio of less than 0.3 versus a 20-session average of 0.7.

Pure-play quantum computing stocks nearly doubled from late August to late September amid heavy options market activity thanks to reports on government support for the sector, M&A activity, tech breakthroughs, and a flurry of price target hikes by Wall Street.

Luke Kawa

Retail traders are killing it this year because of both what they’re buying and when they bought it

Buy the dip. Buy AI. Buy gold.