No one believed Eli Lilly was going to stop extorting diabetic people. The problem for their stock price is that it’s based on their ability to get away with it, so when their behavior is thrust into the middle of the news cycle they take a hit.
The people protesting outside Eli Lilly offices didn’t even need to move fast to seize this opportunity – they were already there, and have been for years. But suddenly it was connected with something the news media thinks is important (i.e. gossip about the website where they all go to huff each others’ farts), and now you have people talking about insulin prices on the news, and mentioning the actual horrifying numbers, so the risk of even American politicians doing something about it has shot up, and that’s what traders are reacting to.
The stock market drop may well have had nothing to do with the tweet. Stocks are a very chaotic, unpredictable system, and analysts like to credit every movement to whatever was the last thing that happened. It may well be that Lilly’s stock was on the way down anyway and this tweet had little to do with it.
And there we have it, Twitter in one phrase
(I guess this also validates Mastodon’s use of the term “Toot” for a message)
That’s true, but the timing is something. The stock market is seldom actually rational though, despite claims to the contrary, so it would not surprise me if it was an emotional reaction to Lily being in the news because of the tweet
(it turns out there is a flaw in reality that makes investors not behave like theoretical well informed, rational actors according to Al Greenspan. Note the flaw is in reality, not in free market theory)
Nice avatar!
They’ll be fixing that in the next release.
Thanks! @orenwolf is only charging me $4.20 a day!
(avatar)
(I just noticed it! Great minds, same rut)
You wouldn’t even need that. The bulk of stock market activity these days is automatic. It’s just as likely some feature of the chatter around the tweet triggered some system to start dumping or shorting the stock. With that just triggering a broader sell off.
Two other drug companies that make insulin had their stock fall at the exact same time, though not as fast. So it could be just some “AI”, data startup algorithm that’s set to dump stock if the price of insulin is trending.
What you say about automated trading is absolutely correct and would also amplify what human traders are doing. And if I actually believed that Lilly was giving away insulin I would sell off stock of competitors. So…
Regardless, I do think that the Twitter chaos is affecting stocks beyond Elon’s through whatever mechanisms
ETA:
Move fast and break things?
Elon’s gone to plaid!
Just being yes men, even extreme toadies, isn’t sufficient to explain how clueless they’re collectively being, but if they’re also quite incompetent, it would. It’s not just that Musk has a lot of unchallenged, incredibly bad ideas, which he does. It also seems like his team is being tasked with providing certain advice and plans, and if Musk really is getting anything from them and acting on it - and apparently he is - it’s really bad advice.
In case no one else has brought it up. Tumblr is currently trolling Twitter for their debacle
Even if that were true, that’s what stress tests are for.
“It wouldn’t have failed if you hadn’t stress-tested it” is certainly a take.
I read that Twitter has just laid off 80% of their contract workers, which includes the moderators, so now we get to find out what happens when there’s massive changes to Twitter moderation. (And of course it was done in the dumbest, cruelest way possible - workers were in the middle of important tasks and found out they no longer worked for the company when they tried logging into to work accounts. Their managers weren’t even told.)
If things seemed to be going to hell up until this point, they’re really going to go downhill now.
