New York (AFP)

Electric vehicle maker Tesla plunged to Wall Street on Friday after a series of baffling tweets from boss Elon Musk, including one saying the share price "too high".

The stock fell more than 8% around 5:00 p.m. GMT, after tumbling more than 13% a little earlier. It remains up over 65% since the start of the year.

The market capitalization of Tesla, a group founded in 2003, is almost double that of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler combined even though these manufacturers sell millions of cars per year.

Tesla hopes to sell half a million cars this year, which will be an all-time high.

"The Tesla share price is too high," wrote Musk on his Twitter account at around 3:15 p.m. GMT, without elaborating further.

This tweet recalls another of 2018 on a possible withdrawal of Tesla from the stock market, which had caused a Homeric standoff between the director and the authority of the financial markets, the SEC, concerning the very sensitive financial communication of companies listed in Stock Exchange.

An agreement that Elon Musk was stripped of his hat as president of Tesla's board of directors had ended the dispute.

In 2019, after further hostilities, the agreement was amended to list subjects on which Mr. Musk could not tweet without the prior green light from Tesla's chief legal officer.

The list included information on the company's financial health, potential mergers and acquisitions, production and sales figures for cars, new models of cars, purchase of Tesla securities and financial products.

Mr. Musk, also boss of the space company SpaceX, also embarked on Friday in a series of tweets, disconnected from each other.

"I am going to sell all my physical goods. I will not own (any more) a house," read one of the messages.

In two others, the whimsical leader reiterates his sharp criticisms against the confinement intended to limit the spread of the Covid-19.

"Now give back to the people their FREEDOM", he gets carried away in a tweet; "Anger, anger at the death of the light of conscience," proclaims another of his messages.

Musk on Wednesday called confinement "fascist", saying that this measure, adopted by countries around the world to fight the health crisis, was suffocating businesses.

The manager had closed the Tesla California plant backwards on March 19 and wanted to reopen it on May 4, but the extension of confinement and social distancing thwarts this project.

All this did not prevent Tesla from generating a net profit of $ 16 million in the first quarter, a first for the first three months of the year since the creation of the group 17 years ago.

© 2020 AFP