Rage firing at his own companies is bad enough, but he was trying to get people fired from completely unrelated companies for their tweets about Tesla.

Back in 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk actively monitored Twitter for tweets containing the hashtag $TSLA, often used by Tesla short-sellers. Musk would reach out to executives at companies to investigate employees who were potentially publishing negative tweets about his electric vehicle company.

During that time, Musk reportedly emailed former Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess in July 2018, questioning whether one of Diess's employees was using Twitter to criticize Tesla anonymously. Business Insider later reported that Volkswagen determined the tweets were posted by the employee's brother.

Musk also allegedly texted Lawrence Fossi's employer. According to the WSJ, on July 23, 2018, Musk sent a text to the top executive at Fossi's company, asking the boss whether he knew his employee, known on Twitter as Montana Skeptic, "was obsessively trashing Tesla via a pseudonym," as disclosed in the report.

Following the incident, Fossi voluntarily deactivated his Twitter account and ceased writing for Seeking Alpha. Expressing his surprise at the extent to which Musk would go to quash criticism, Fossi commented, "I'm a nobody and he calls my employer?"