I think this article could be a little bit more precise with its reporting.

The Washington Post reported in April 2022 that Musk had already used more than half of his more than 170 million Tesla shares as collateral to acquire loans, and planned to do so again to borrow more money to buy Twitter, now X.

This was before a 3:1 stock split, so would represent 510 million shares today. Back then, those shares were worth $62 billion. Today, it’s more than doubled. So even if he’s done nothing with his debt or his shares, all the gains of the past few years would serve to give him a lot more cushion, to where he’d be safe even if the stock price plummets further, to around half of what it is today. More likely, though, he’s used some of the money from selling some of the shares to pay down his debt.

Musk acquired X for $44 billion in October 2022, borrowing roughly $13 billion from several banks

Unfortunately, that $13 billion was borrowed by Twitter itself, not by Musk. If the corporation defaults on the loans, the banks can force the sale of Twitter’s assets and wipe out the value of the shares (destroying the value of Musk’s investment). But that’s not debt that could be called and somehow jump over to Tesla share prices.

So it is true that a tanking Tesla stock price can cascade into a bankruptcy for him. But it needs to fall a lot more than where it’s fallen today. Probably needs to lose another half of its value, at a minimum, maybe more, before it actually triggers a cascading failure.

A not-insignificant portion of Trump’s base will be in this boat, if they aren’t already. We should be ready with messaging to pull them out of the cult, so that they don’t fall back in.