Imagine having the power to cause a company’s value to tumble by a fortune.
That’s the case with a select group of celebrities with a simple comment on social media or a gesture at a press event.
Some of these famous faces have been able to cost a firm billions of dollars when their stock value drops massively.
In this article, we’re going to look at the most expensive instances when this has happened.
We have football/soccer icon Cristiano Ronaldo with Coca-Cola, Kylie Jenner with snapchat, Elon Musk and Tesla, Donald Trump with a couple of companies and more.
So let’s get started.
6 Times Celebs Cost Company’s Billions of Dollars with Just a Single Action
Cristiano Ronaldo
At the time of writing euro 2020 is underway.
This football/soccer tournament for European nations was previously won in 2016 by Portugal.
So on Monday June 14th Portugal’s captain Cristiano Ronaldo took part in a press conference alongside his manager Fernando Santos.
As the country was due to take on Hungary the following day.
As the Juventus forward sat down, he spotted two Coca-Cola bottles placed in front of him.
The soft drink firm was one of the sponsors for the Euros.
Annoyed Ronaldo moved the bottles then said the Portuguese word for water “agua” at the journalist and held a bottle of water aloft.
Before this action coke shares were valued at $56.17.
After the conference they dropped by 1.6% to 55.22.
This meant that the company lost $4 billion.
Coca-Cola’s market value was at $242 billion at the start and $238 billion by the end.
French midfielder Paul Pogba mirrored Ronaldo the following day.
The Manchester united player removed a bottle of Heineken beer during a conference, while it turned out to be the non-alcoholic brand.
Pogba is a practicing Muslim and doesn’t drink alcohol.
Elon Musk
Back in May 2020 Elon Musk decided to tweet a short comment.
Yet it ended up being devastating to his own company.
The message stated “Tesla stock prices too high imo”.
At the start of the day on May 1st Tesla’s market value was at $141 billion.
Yet after the tweet it collapsed to 127 billion dollars, a fall of $14 billion.
It also knocked $3 billion off of Musk’s own stake in Tesla.
This action drew the ire of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also known as the SEC.
Back in 2018, the group took Musk and Tesla to court for claims via twitter that Musk was ready to take the electric car firm private.
Musk and Tesla were fined $20 million each from this.
And Musk was banned from being chair of the board for three years. After the 2020, incident the SEC approached a judge to bring charges against Musk once again.
They believed this tweet along with others from 2019 violated the agreement from 2018.
However the judge blocked the lawsuit as they didn’t believe it was too damaging due to a year of growth for Tesla.
Kylie Jenner
Back in 2018 prior to all the drama on whether she was a billionaire or not, Kylie Jenner was tweeting in February.
She asked her 24.5 million followers at the time whether like her they aren’t using Snapchat anymore.
This was in response to the social media app releasing a big redesign at the time that upset a lot of users of the app.
This comment from Jenner caused Snapchat’s share price to fall by 6% by the end of the day, which meant the company’s value fell by $1.3 billion.
The incident had a negative effect on Snapchat’s market cap for a number of days.
On February 20th the day before Jenner’s tweet the firm’s market cap was at $24.06 billion.
By the 27th, it fell to as low as $20.74 billion.
At the time of writing their market cap is at $98.59 billion.
Jenner seemingly had reservations about her comment.
Only 10 minutes after her original tweet she sent a follow-up which stated “still love you tho snap…my first love”
Lebron James
Basketball legend Lebron James and South Korean tech giants Samsung have had a long working relationship.
James has popped up in a number of commercials and has been a spokesperson for the firm.
However in March 2014, James let his frustrations get the better of him.
We’ve all had phone problems at some stage so it’s understandable.
Anyway he tweeted that his phone deleted everything stored on it and rebooted. Nightmare both for him and for Samsung.
As at the time James’s 12 million followers may have seen the comment.
A few minutes after posting the comment was deleted.
He later tweeted that he managed to recover everything.
After that he sent a few other updates that made fun of the original comment.
While it’s unlikely it played a huge factor, James’ mistake may have contributed to Samsung’s fall in its market cap.
During 2013, they had a value of 176.36 billion dollars, for 2014 it was $170.66 billion.
Samsung sales took a hit too.
In 2013 they made around $207.5 million, in 2014 it fell to around $187 million.
Sucheta Dalal
Recently on June 12 2021, business journalist and author Sucheta Dalal tweeted a comment that had a big effect on the Adani group.
She alluded to a scandal going on at the company behind the scenes.
The Adani group was founded by Gautam Adani back in 1988.
The Indian conglomerate took a big hit on the stock market.
According to reports, shortly after the tweet their share price dropped as low as 25%.
Only in April 2021, the firm had a market cap of $107 billion.
Not long after the tweet, the Adani group reportedly lost $7.6 billion as their share prices tumbled and it got worse.
Rumours began to come out that the company had a number of accounts frozen, which the company has denied.
In the space of five days since Dalal’s comments the Adani group lost $25.83 billion.
Gautam Adani’s personal wealth has also become hugely affected.
According to Bloomberg, on June 13th Adani had a net worth of $77 billion.
Yet once the stories came out by the 18th it was $62.9 billion, a drop of $14.1 billion.
Donald Trump
Until recently when he was banned from the platform the relationship between Donald Trump and Twitter tended to cause shockwaves across the U.S. which probably means a number of companies across the states can relax a bit now the former president is no longer tweeting.
During December 12 2016, the then president-elect took aim at the F-35 planes that were being made by Lockheed Martin.
According to reports the contract was worth at least $6.1 billion.
Trump stated that the program was out of control and billions could be spent elsewhere.
This caused the share price for the company to nosedive from $259.53 to $246.
In the end, $4 billion was wiped from Lockheed Martin’s value.
This makes it a loss of around 28.6 million dollars per character in Trump’s tweet.
Only a few days prior, on December 6th Trump tweeted that the costs for the Boeing 747 for Air Force One were out of control as well.
This tweet seemingly knocked off nearly $1 billion from the plane manufacturer’s market share almost immediately.
By December 12th Boeing’s market value had fallen by $1.4 billion.
Final fact finish, one of the biggest stock market disasters was the Wall Street crash of 1929.
This event was seen as the catalyst for the great depression that would haunt many nations for a number of years.
According to experts, the Wall Street crash is estimated to have wiped out the equivalent of $586.4 billion today.
