Tesla sinks after Musk’s ‘kind of high’ comment

September 5, 2014

CNBC 

When Elon Musk talked, the stock market listened. Tesla stock prices dropped Friday, a day after the CEO said investors often “get carried away” with the electric car company’s stock price.

Musk made his comments after announcingNevada as the winner of Tesla (TSLA)‘s $5 billion battery gigafactory.

“I think our stock price is kind of high right now,” Musk said Thursday, responding to a question from CNBC at the news conference in Carson City. “If you care about the long term, Tesla, I think the stock is a good price. If you look at the short term, it is less clear.”

Shares of Tesla have rocketed 90 percent this year. Since its 2010 initial public offering priced at $17 a share, the stock has risen about 1,400 percent to about $286 as of Thursday’s close.

In early afternoon trading Friday, Tesla’s stock price was down about 3½ percent. (Click here for the latest quote.) (TSLA)

Read More Tesla chooses Nevada for battery factory

Construction of the gigafactory just outside of Reno is already underway. With the immediate creation of about half of the projected 6,500 jobs, Nevada expects $100 billion in economic benefits from the plant. In exchange, the state is offering an estimated $1.25 billion to Tesla through incentives such as tax abatements.

Although not the richest offer the company received from the five bidding states, Musk told CNBC that Nevada had the best opportunity to get the factory up and running immediately.

“The biggest single factor was time to completion, because unless the gigafactory is ready when we need to produce the mass-market affordable electric car, the vehicle factory will be stalled. So time to execution was extremely important,” he said. “Nevada was in the lead, I would say number one, in time to execution.”

Read More Tesla plant will lower Nevada unemployment

The electric car maker expects the gigafactory to open by 2017, possibly as early as late 2016.

-By CNBC.com staff. Reporting by CNBC’s Phil LeBeau

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