Imagine you could pick up your phone, write a tweet, and make $14 billion disappear from the stock market. Crazy, right? Well, that’s exactly what Elon Musk did with just 7 words. And there are even bigger cases: Donald Trump needed 102 words to trigger a $1.36 trillion drop across global markets, and an influencer like Kylie Jenner wiped out $1.3 billion from Snapchat. Let’s look at how markets can literally move trillions off the back of tweets.
Case 1: Musk and Tesla’s $14 billion
It was May 1, 2020. Tesla had been reporting better-than-expected results, had just posted its third straight profitable quarter, and the stock had rallied hard in the weeks before. And then Musk decided to write:
“Tesla stock price is too high in my opinion.”
According to Reuters, Tesla ended up dropping around 9%. Other outlets estimated that somewhere between $13 and $14 billion was wiped off its market cap.
Why did it hit so hard? Because it wasn’t an analyst saying Tesla was overpriced — it was the company’s own CEO. Many investors could read it as Musk knowing something they didn’t, or warning that the rally had gone too far.
Back in 2018, Musk posted that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share and that he had “funding secured.” The SEC argued that claim didn’t have enough backing. The outcome? Musk had to step down as Tesla’s board chairman for three years, with a $20 million fine for him and another $20 million for the company.
Case 2: Trump and $1.36 trillion in 102 words
In May 2019, markets were pretty much assuming the US and China were close to a trade deal. Things were calm. And I think that’s exactly why the hit landed even harder.
One Sunday, Trump posted two messages announcing he’d raise tariffs from 10% to 25% on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, and threatened to impose tariffs on basically everything China sold to the US. Total: 102 words.
- According to Bloomberg, those words helped wipe out roughly $1.36 trillion from global stock markets over the following days
- The VIX, the volatility index, spiked
- Chinese stock markets had one of their worst sessions in years
Trump wasn’t giving an opinion on a company, he was changing the rules of the entire global economy. Within seconds, the market had to recalculate corporate earnings, inflation, and economic growth. It didn’t drop because investors disliked the tone — it dropped because the message changed expectations about the future.
Case 3: Kylie Jenner and Snapchat’s $1.3 billion
Probably the strangest of the three. In February 2018, Snapchat was getting hammered with criticism over its app redesign. Then Kylie Jenner, who had 24 million Twitter followers at the time, simply tweeted: “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?”
She later added that she still loved the app, but the damage was already done: the stock dropped more than 6% and the company lost around $1.3 billion in market value.
Time and Bloomberg explained that the market didn’t react just because she was famous, but because she represented exactly the kind of user Snapchat needed to keep: young, active on social media, and able to influence millions of people. Her message seemed to confirm a fear Wall Street already had — that the redesign was driving people to use the app less.
The key idea: the match and the gasoline
And here’s the most important part, my takeaway from all of this. A tweet almost never destroys billions on its own. It usually works like a match struck inside a room that’s already full of gasoline.
The problem was already there. It just takes someone saying it out loud to light that match:
- Tesla had rallied hard and there were real doubts about its valuation
- With Trump, the trade war already had investors on edge
- Snapchat was already going through a crisis over its redesign
So the message doesn’t always create the problem: sometimes it just confirms it, sometimes it shifts expectations, and sometimes it causes thousands of investors to try to head for the same exit at the same time.
Algorithms read before you do
On top of that, it’s not just people reacting these days. Trading algorithms read headlines, spot keywords, and fire off orders in fractions of a second. When a phrase like “new tariffs,” “stock too expensive,” or a viral criticism of a platform shows up, the first sell orders can already be executing before you’ve even read the tweet.
In fact, several studies have found a meaningful relationship between spikes in social media activity and sentiment and abnormal stock price movements.
When we say $14 billion “disappeared” from Tesla or $1.3 billion from Snapchat, we’re talking about market capitalization: the market simply started pricing every share of the company lower. It’s not a box of cash that someone stole. But for anyone who sold during the drop, the loss was very real.
Conclusion
Next time you see a post from Musk, Trump, or anyone with millions of followers, don’t just look at what they wrote. Ask yourself who’s saying it, what expectations it just changed, and what existing fear it just confirmed. Because a sentence of a few words can look insignificant… until you check the chart on ProRealTime and see a red candle running across the screen. If you’re into this same idea — the market moving on expectations rather than absolute numbers — check out the analysis of why Netflix tanked after beating earnings.
