Tesla stock split, Shanghai shutdown to Covid, Elon Musk changes the narrative to his advantage

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Last month, I wrote about Tesla frontrunning California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing by publishing a blog post about the agency’s racial-discrimination and harassment lawsuit before the lawsuit was even filed. It was a clear move to get ahead of allegations of widespread mistreatment of Black workers at the automaker’s facilities throughout the state.

Tesla and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk never cease to amaze when it comes to owning a news cycle. Musk generates constant coverage, some of it warranted but much of it fluff, speculation or a regurgitation of his tweets. And when there’s a spate of negative news, Tesla often manages to get ahead of it or change the subject.

This weekend was another good case study. The Washington Post published a story Saturday about Musk’s dealings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that led with an unsavory anecdote. The CEO threw a fit when agency officials called to say they were investigating the first fatal crash involving Autopilot in 2016, an unidentified former safety official told the Post.

Then, my Bloomberg colleagues reported Sunday that Tesla would suspend production at its Shanghai plant as the local government locks down half the city to conduct a massive testing blitz amid a Covid-19 outbreak. Musk got in on the act, sharing in an oh-by-the-way tweet that Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, is on a roughly four-month-long “sabbatical.”

And that’s not all. Musk disclosed he apparently has Covid again.

By the time premarket trading started Monday, Tesla shares were down less than 1%. None of the above developments were unmitigated disasters: Musk has feuded with U.S. safety officials before; Tesla plans to reopen