Elon Musk lost $20 billion in personal net worth on Friday after unveiling Tesla’s experimental Roadster sports car, pulling his fortune down to $925 billion.
The 2.11 percent single-day drop tracked a 1.3 percent slide in Tesla shares on Thursday, extending the automaker’s year-to-date market decline to 17 percent.
Tesla presented the new two-seater Roadster with an autonomous demonstration where the vehicle climbed a steep ramp, hung upside down, flipped in the air, and landed using cold-gas thrusters. Musk said the sports car accelerates from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than one second, using 10 nozzles fed by ultra high-pressure air tanks developed with rocket engineers at SpaceX.
SpaceX shares dropped 2.3 percent following the event, bringing its own year-to-date decline to nearly 8 percent. Commercial mass production for the vehicle is scheduled for 2028, four years behind earlier timelines.
“It was an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Tesla investor Deepwater Asset Management, said on social media platform X.
For automotive supply chains and retail distribution networks across Asia, the stunt confirms Tesla’s pivot away from entry-level passenger electric vehicles toward speculative halo hardware. Asian rivals such as BYD, Geely, and Hyundai have consolidated volume sales across Southeast Asia by rolling out practical, sub-$25,000 passenger cars. Tesla instead spent engineering capital on an ultra-luxury niche model that offers no commercial volume for suppliers or fleet operators for years.
Institutional investors in Asia-Pacific holding tech-heavy portfolios face increased exposure to execution risk.
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