Elon Musk is hurting capitalism

For capitalism to thrive, there needs to be a strong shareholder base of ordinary investors, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Taking Tesla private sends the wrong signal.

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Elon Musk: maybe he needs an incentive to stay public
(Image credit: © 2014 David Rawcliffe/Propaganda. All Rights Reserved.)

There was a telling sentence in Tesla founder Elon Musk's letter to his staff discussing the possibility that the electric-car maker might leave the public stockmarket. If it did, he said, it wouldn't necessarily be forever: the firm could return once it has entered a "phase of slower, more predictable growth" for which you can probably read, once its private backers have enjoyed its major growth phase, extracted all the cash they can, and found the right point in the market cycle to sell it back to ordinary punters at a price that extrapolates past growth for ever and will eventually seem insane in retrospect.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.