Elon Musk kept the world in suspense this year with the Twitter takeover drama.

The former shareholders of the online platform should be grateful to him.

Musk paid $44 billion, far more than the company was worth at the time of the acquisition, by his own admission.

At the end of the year, the perspective of shareholders of Tesla, the company for which Musk is primarily known and which is also the most important source of his personal wealth, is quite different.

The electric car maker's share price has fallen more than 70 percent this year.

Since the takeover of Twitter in October alone, there has been a drop of almost 50 percent.

The market value has now slipped below 350 billion dollars.

In the fall of last year, the company's market capitalization exceeded the $1 trillion mark.

Musk has tried to explain the weak development on the stock market with higher interest rates.

Of course, Tesla has fared much worse than the overall market.

Many analysts see Musk's Twitter adventure as the main reason for the price crash.

They see it as a distraction from his job at Tesla and fear that his increasingly provocative statements on Twitter will alienate customers of the electric car manufacturer.

The price should also be weighed down by the fact that Musk has repeatedly sold larger blocks of Tesla shares to finance the acquisition, the total value of which has added up to $23 billion since the beginning of the year.

Beyond these Twitter effects, Tesla shareholders have other concerns.

The economic environment is uncertain, Musk himself warned of a recession just a few days ago.

Tesla is also facing increasing competition in the electric car business.

A stock market favorite for a long time

Tesla has long been a stock market darling.

Especially in 2020 and 2021, the two years before Musk took over Twitter, the stock has appreciated enormously.

At times, the company was valued higher than almost all of its larger competitors combined.

Even after the share price losses this year, Tesla is still the most valuable automaker in the world.

Economically, Tesla is solid at the moment.

The company has regularly reported losses in the past, but is now clearly profitable, with net income of almost $9 billion in the first nine months of this year.

Tesla continued its expansion course this year and opened new plants in Grünheide, Brandenburg, and Austin, Texas.

There was also an expansion of the product range, with a delay of several years, the company delivered the first examples of its "Semi" truck in early December.

But the Twitter saga pushed all of that into the background - and raised the question of how much attention Musk still has for Tesla.

This is all the more true as he already wears several hats.

In addition to Tesla, where he is officially called CEO and “Technoking”, he is also at the head of the aerospace specialist Space X.

Tesla specifically lists being "extremely dependent" on Musk as a risk factor in its annual report, and admits he doesn't dedicate all of his time to the company because of his other responsibilities.

Following the completion of the acquisition in October, Musk also made himself CEO of Twitter, admitting he currently spends most of his time on the online platform.

He reinforces this impression on his own Twitter account, where he seems more active than ever and many entries revolve around his new acquisition.

Meanwhile, he seems to be provoking controversy with his decisions as the new owner.

For example, he lifted the Twitter ban for former US President Donald Trump, but in the meantime suspended some journalists who wrote critically about him.

In general, Musk has become much more political this year.

He has often taken positions that are well received in the right-wing political camp, recommending voting for the Republican Party ahead of the US congressional elections.