Elon Musk lashes out at state of US financial markets says, ‘immense pressure on companies to…’

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Elon Musk has lashed out at the state of the US financial markets, citing the intense regulatory pressure faced by public companies such as Tesla. He also noted how shareholder pressure is limiting efficiency and how passive investing is leading to only 4-5 major stock pickers influencing market movements.

In a conversation with ARK Investment's Cathie Wood on X Spaces (formerly Twitter Spaces), Musk talked about how not taking SpaceX public has allowed him to take more risks compared to Tesla. However, the billionaire did admit that keeping Tesla public has allowed him to maintain access to a steady flow of capital, Bloomberg reported.

Notably, Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal last year and took the company private, allowing him to make a number of changes, including changing the company's name to X, removing the old verified programme and adding a limit to the number of posts viewers can see in a day. Notably, the Bloomberg report notes that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has also argued in the past that the social media company had struggled because of public investors, and even urged Musk to take the company private to fix its business.

Explaining the strain of running a publicly funded company, Musk said: “There’s a lot of pressure, like immense pressure on a public company to not have a bad quarter. So this can actually result in a less efficient operation where you’re going to great lengths at the end of the quarter to not disappoint people" The billionaire added that the “time horizons do not match between investors versus a company’s long-term vision." Elon Musk also talked about how passive has lead to unequally rewarding companies that are in key benchmarks.