In Complete Control, or Complete Loss of Control?

OPEC members met this week and agreed to an additional one million barrels a day in production cuts for 2024. This goes along with an extension of Saudi Arabia’s voluntary production cut of the same amount into 2024 as well. The meeting of OPEC nations was originally scheduled for Sunday and pushed back to Thursday, as reports indicated some member nations may not have been in complete agreement with the proposed cuts. Attached heads prevailed and production cuts were agreed upon with an announcement Thursday morning that initially saw crude oil futures spike $2-plus, putting in a high of $79.60 for the day in January crude oil futures. The rally did not hold for long as January crude oil futures finished down $1.90 on the day at $75.96, leaving one to wonder if heads will roll as OPEC’s unified front may have a crack in it.

Elon Musk was on CNBC this week and his first appearance garnered a lot of attention, as he did not mince words telling big corporate advertisers that they were welcome to have sex with themselves if they thought he could be blackmailed with pulled advertising and lost sponsorship dollars as a response to a perceived antisemitic remark he made on Twitter. Musk had recently returned from a trip to Israel, where he spent time with President Benjamin Netanyahu that some claimed was an apology tour, but which Musk claimed had already been planned. In any case, Musk had a revealing, frank interview where he was clearly not begging advertisers for forgiveness.

The very next day, Musk presided over a press conference to reveal details about Tesla’s new Cybertruck, with commercial production finally hitting the market. The press conference was broadcast live on CNBC. Tesla stock is up 116 percent for the year at roughly $234/share as of Friday morning.

X (Twitter) was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after Musk acquired it and went private with the company, but it was estimated to be worth $19 billion in October, according to Bloomberg. Musk originally paid $44 billion for his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022.

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