It's pretty incredible to see Tesla bleeding out as much as it is at the moment. The truth is that even thought he is the richest man on Earth at the moment, wealth, at least how it's measured now, does not equate liquidity.
All stocks
There are known loopholes used by powerful people to avoid paying taxes while living like modern kings. Maybe these tricks are not common knowledge, but I believe the should be.
The gimmick is to loan against your assets, against Tesla stock, in the case of Elon and not take a single cent in salary. Then your "income" is not really income per say, it's just debt. You service the debt with another loan, and then just pile one after the other until the house of cards collides.
As you might guess this requires continuous growth, otherwise it would run out of steam quickly, but this is how the cookie crumbles when it comes to late stage capitalism antics.
So what's the problem?
Elon is still today seen as the face of Tesla, and these numbers we keep on hearing about, his unbelievable wealth, is mainly people adding up his holdings of his own stock.
All the things he's been doing lately, the scandals, his introducing into MAGAland, and his fight with some factions of the MAGA world is hurting his image in the eyes of his investors.
Like a Bank run
It's being reported that his debt is already being sold, and we can see the market sentiment being reflected on TESLA's stock quite clearly.
In other words, long time Tesla investors don't think that Elon is focused on the task at hand, and they are beginning to jump ship. This ship jumping got started by financial institutions, but it's already trickling down to retail investors.