Hasbro Stock Price Surges After Elon Musk Makes Comments About Purchasing Company

Hasbro's stock price has jumped nearly 2% after Elon Musk made an offhand comment on his social media platform about potentially buying the Dungeons & Dragons publisher. Coming out of the US Thanksgiving holiday, Hasbro's stock price jumped by 2% on Friday. The cause appears not to be Black Friday sales, but rather Elon Musk's recent comments about Hasbro and Dungeons & Dragons. Early Thursday morning, Musk responded to a post on the app formerly known as Twitter by social media culture warrior Ian Miles Cheong asking "How much is Hasbro?" Cheong had posted Facebook comments made by D&D designer Jason Tondro, who spoke about his decision to include acknowledgement of outdated views within early versions of Dungeons & Dragons. In his post, Cheong called the phrase "grognard" a slur and also incorrectly referred to Tondro as the "project lead" of Dungeons & Dragons. In another post, Cheong incorrectly stated that Hasbro owned the "license" to Dungeons & Dragons. (Hasbro owns Dungeons & Dragons outright.) Musk's net worth is estimated at over $334 billion.

The stock price responded positively to the possibility of Musk purchasing Hasbro, with the price bouncing well ahead of Wednesday's price of $63.89. Musk is an expert businessman, having previously purchased Twitter for $44 billion after a prolonged lawsuit in which he attempted to back out of the deal. Twitter's valuation currently sits at around $9 billion, a decrease of nearly 80%. Hasbro's current market cap is $9.1 billion, which means Musk would only stand to lose around $7 billion should he tank its value at a similar rate to Twitter's.

Musk's interest in the toymaker stems from his umbrage over comments found in The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons. In the foreword of the book, Tondro discusses the "moral quandry" in early D&D material, specifically referencing insensitive and derogatory language that was "casually harmful to anyone with a physical or metal disability, or happens to be old, fat, not conventionally attractive, indigenous, Black, or a woman." Tondro never criticizes Gary Gygax or the other co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons by name in the foreword, but Musk and several other right-wing leaning commentators took his words as an explicit attack.

 

[occam]

Thac0 returns, females have -4 strength, orcs are always Chaotic Evil, and each manuscript is published full of errors and missing info.

Those Pesky Dunjunz and Dragunz?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Here, this might help.

Someone pointed out how unlikely it is for Elon to buy Hasbro.

Thank you for this post. It isn't even for my sake.

Two members of my DnD group are a trans-woman and her wife. They are actually leaving my state because they no longer feel safe here. DnD is a haven for them, and a place to have friends. A known transphobic bigot like Musk taking control of that Hobby? It would devastate them.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Thank you for this post. It isn't even for my sake.

Two members of my DnD group are a trans-woman and her wife. They are actually leaving my state because they no longer feel safe here. DnD is a haven for them, and a place to have friends. A known transphobic bigot like Musk taking control of that Hobby? It would devastate them.

California should be a safe haven for Transfolks, I'd suggest Canada, but immigrating here is really, really, hard, and immigration cuts are being implemented here because of thr housing crisis sorry. I feel guilty for that fact, I like immigration.

California has better weather anyways and alot less paper work.

 

[Maxperson]

I prefer President Comancho.

President Trejo or bust.

 

[Maxperson]

I'd use what I have and buy 3PP to supplement it. Just like I did during 4e. I'd also try to run some some non-D&D games in between.

Same. That seems like a reasonable course to me.

 

[Zardnaar]

California should be a safe haven for Transfolks, I'd suggest Canada, but immigrating here is really, really, hard, and immigration cuts are being implemented here because of thr housing crisis sorry. I feel guilty for that fact, I like immigration.

California has better weather anyways and alot less paper work.

What's happened in Canada happened here but even more.
Where USA us we hit tgat a decade ago.

25% population growth over 17 years 7 tines OECD averages iirc double high immigration.

Predictably support for it cratered. House prices were an issue 15 years ago became a cruise ten years ago.

At its worst I could sell in our cheapest city and buy in America and have 200k left over. Brother could sell up and relocate to
California or Seattle.

Everyone's busy sodding off to Australia now plus recession.

 

[Nord Ronnoc]

Thank you for this post. It isn't even for my sake.

Two members of my DnD group are a trans-woman and her wife. They are actually leaving my state because they no longer feel safe here. DnD is a haven for them, and a place to have friends. A known transphobic bigot like Musk taking control of that Hobby? It would devastate them.

No problem. I stumbled upon this thread on Bluesky by sheer luck. When there was an opportunity to share it, I took it.

 

[GreyLord]

I'm more than willing to sell every bit of stock I have in the company if he pays a similar pay out as he did with Twitter (basically paying out more than it was valued).

It's not that I'm no longer interested in Hasbro products...but...you know...sometimes money is sort of important.

All he has to do is convince all the others (or at least so he has a controlling interest) to sell and he has control.

The higher it goes, the more he pays, the happier many would be.

I hope it hits the moon! And then I hope he has to buy!

I know, terrible of me, but hey, if he wants to deal with some of the woes and troubles...more power to him. There are other RPG companies in the world and other stocks to invest in.

 

[GreyLord]

I still think it is very unlikely he would or that he was serious, but isn't musk valued at over 300 Billion? I realize that isn't cash sitting in a bank, but I would think he could pretty easily cover the 4.6 billion mentioned in the linked thread (again I am not a money guy so maybe I am missing some technical aspect, it just seems like billionaires with this level of wealth have an easy time buying stuff if they really want to)

I think a tougher matter will be to convince all the various investors and companies to sell off to him so that he has actual control.

He could try to do a stealth buyout, and gradually buy some stocks as they get available. You probably have enough eyes watching that it may not be possible, but he could try that way.

Or, he could offer a price that basically makes everyone an enthusiastic seller (because we all make a horde of money), and takes control that way.

It's not like it's going to be the cost of twitter (but if he did offer that much...boy...oh boy...I think many would be dancing in the streets).

As for the name, I don't think he'd rename D&D to X or anything like that.

He still would value the brand of D&D I think. I think he actually does have an interest in D&D (though it probably is more of the older versions of D&D, with 3.X being the latest version he has an interest in, and perhaps being a fan of the more old style TSR D&D, at least from his comments) and so would want to keep it as a D&D type name.

I'm not sure what he might rename it if he really wanted to, closest I could think of would be something such as DxD or something like that (though I think DxD is already trademarked).

 

[geek0id]

You know Ukraine would have already fallen without StarLink? It's why big Z sucks up to Musk.

False.