American electric car maker Tesla has temporarily suspended the release of its most popular model – Model 3 – at its California plant. Bloomberg reports this, citing sources.
Electric cars will not be assembled from February 22 to March 7, 2021. The company said that it will pay employees salaries for February 22 and 23, but will not pay for February 28 and March 1-3, advising them to take a vacation for this period. Amid the news, the company’s shares fell 3.4 percent at the premarket to $ 716.6 per share.
On Monday, February 22nd, Tesla shares saw a record drop since September 2020, down 8.6 percent. The decline in the value of securities is associated, among other things, with the tweets of the head of the company, Elon Musk, who wrote a few days earlier that the rates of the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum “seem to be high.”
This happened two weeks after Tesla announced a $ 1.5 billion investment in bitcoin. Musk then criticized the cryptocurrency and said the company’s decision did not fully reflect his opinion. The fall in Tesla shares reduced the entrepreneur’s fortune by $ 15 billion and he ceased to be the richest man on the planet according to Bloomberg.