Are you familiar with the term 'pre-market' sales? Tesla opened a full $6 lower than the last close because of the pre-market sentiment, and in part this was due to the tweet. How big a fraction is impossible to say but I'm pretty sure that Musk is well aware of the effect of his tweets by now. I don't have access to a terminal but I can look back as far as 4 am on public sources and by then it was clear the stock was going to open much lower.

If you have a better explanation about why it took him a couple of hours to try some damage control I'm all ears.

> monitoring Tesla's stock price like a hawk and if the sentiment drops he'll be aware of it well before the figures are published.

This is not a thing. The figures come out in real time for very basic trading accounts and iirc google finance gives them real time from the exchanges.

Also, the opening price is not set by pre-market action unless there a massive amount of abnormal AH volume. The participants that show up for the opening bids are 3-4 orders of magnitude higher in volume than the pre-market traders. Gauging general market sentiment from after hours action is folly, even in highly traded instruments like the index futures or the SPY etf.