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posted Facebook comments made by D&D designer Jason Tondro, who spoke about his decision to include acknowledgement of outdated views within early versions of Dungeons & Dragons.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.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

To a first approximation I don't think you can buy all of an index fund's holdings of a stock. As I understand it, if a stock in their portfolio goes up a lot they sell some of it and buy some of the lower performing stocks they hold with the proceeds. And that's sure as bleep what I would be doing if I were crazy enough to buy stocks retail rather than stick my money in index funds.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

False.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

 

[Remathilis]

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).

Twitter was iconic. It had cultural relevance, it coined a verb in tweeting, and was recognizable with the image of the blue bird alone. Musk was more than willing to throw that away for his generic X branding. He removed blue checkmarks as a way of proving identity and made them just a way to juice the algorithm. He has made blocking toothless, gated free options (polls) behind a paywall, and removed almost all the people who are supposed to be monitoring his site for gore and porn. He broke all the API and charges THOUSANDS of dollars for it and made searching Twitter via websearch undoable.

You REALLY think he cares about the sanctity of the D&D brand?

He will immediately put a new edition out with HIS mark on it. He will fire the current teams and fill them full of grifters and influencers willing to bend the knee to him. People Gruumz, RPG Pundit or Satine Phoenix. He will let them do what they want, as long as the game is full of things that will "trigger the libs".

He'll make sure there is a mandatory electronic element so you can't play "offline" and you need subscriptions to play. He will cram it full of whatever buzzwords he's hanging on right now (AI, Blockchain, microtransactions) in an attempt to make sure D&D is a constant source of income.

He will do whatever he can to make sure the game is incompatible with 3pp, right up to fighting with them in court to get them to not support his game. (This is the man who makes proprietary Tesla chargers, I really doubt he's in the mood to support open gaming).

Oh, and get ready for AI DMs. Ready in the next Four Years(TM).

My only hope is that Musk is legitimately unwilling or unable to acquire Hasbro or any part of it. Because it would be a disaster for the gaming community at large. The only hope would be Pathfinder being the Bluesky (again) that creates a lifeboat for gamers fleeing D&D as it sinks under the waves.

 

[Chaosmancer]

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.

You can think that, but Musk's track record itself points to that being false. For just one example, he has gone on record saying he wants a Star Trek future... but his every move is one to increase corporate power and entrench capitalism, which is the exact opposite of Star Trek future. So why does it he want it? Because it looks cool.

And that is the end of Musk's interest in most properties. He likes that it looks cool. It would give him an excuse to hold a big sword, and that would be about as much thought as he would put into the lore and depth of DnD.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Twitter was iconic. It had cultural relevance, it coined a verb in tweeting, and was recognizable with the image of the blue bird alone. Musk was more than willing to throw that away for his generic X branding. He removed blue checkmarks as a way of proving identity and made them just a way to juice the algorithm. He has made blocking toothless, gated free options (polls) behind a paywall, and removed almost all the people who are supposed to be monitoring his site for gore and porn. He broke all the API and charges THOUSANDS of dollars for it and made searching Twitter via websearch undoable.

You REALLY think he cares about the sanctity of the D&D brand?

He will immediately put a new edition out with HIS mark on it. He will fire the current teams and fill them full of grifters and influencers willing to bend the knee to him. People Gruumz, RPG Pundit or Satine Phoenix. He will let them do what they want, as long as the game is full of things that will "trigger the libs".

He'll make sure there is a mandatory electronic element so you can't play "offline" and you need subscriptions to play. He will cram it full of whatever buzzwords he's hanging on right now (AI, Blockchain, microtransactions) in an attempt to make sure D&D is a constant source of income.

He will do whatever he can to make sure the game is incompatible with 3pp, right up to fighting with them in court to get them to not support his game. (This is the man who makes proprietary Tesla chargers, I really doubt he's in the mood to support open gaming).

Oh, and get ready for AI DMs. Ready in the next Four Years(TM).

My only hope is that Musk is legitimately unwilling or unable to acquire Hasbro or any part of it. Because it would be a disaster for the gaming community at large. The only hope would be Pathfinder being the Bluesky (again) that creates a lifeboat for gamers fleeing D&D as it sinks under the waves.

Also this

 

[Bedrockgames]

Twitter was iconic. It had cultural relevance, it coined a verb in tweeting, and was recognizable with the image of the blue bird alone. Musk was more than willing to throw that away for his generic X branding. He removed blue checkmarks as a way of proving identity and made them just a way to juice the algorithm. He has made blocking toothless, gated free options (polls) behind a paywall, and removed almost all the people who are supposed to be monitoring his site for gore and porn. He broke all the API and charges THOUSANDS of dollars for it and made searching Twitter via websearch undoable.

You REALLY think he cares about the sanctity of the D&D brand?

He will immediately put a new edition out with HIS mark on it. He will fire the current teams and fill them full of grifters and influencers willing to bend the knee to him. People Gruumz, RPG Pundit or Satine Phoenix. He will let them do what they want, as long as the game is full of things that will "trigger the libs".

He'll make sure there is a mandatory electronic element so you can't play "offline" and you need subscriptions to play. He will cram it full of whatever buzzwords he's hanging on right now (AI, Blockchain, microtransactions) in an attempt to make sure D&D is a constant source of income.

He will do whatever he can to make sure the game is incompatible with 3pp, right up to fighting with them in court to get them to not support his game. (This is the man who makes proprietary Tesla chargers, I really doubt he's in the mood to support open gaming).

Oh, and get ready for AI DMs. Ready in the next Four Years(TM).

My only hope is that Musk is legitimately unwilling or unable to acquire Hasbro or any part of it. Because it would be a disaster for the gaming community at large. The only hope would be Pathfinder being the Bluesky (again) that creates a lifeboat for gamers fleeing D&D as it sinks under the waves.

Twitter was awful before musk and a different kind of awful after him

 

[mamba]

Twitter was awful before musk and a different kind of awful after him

it is a much worse kind of awful now, that is why the advertisers left

 

[Vaalingrade]

He still would value the brand of D&D I think.

It would be the first time he's demonstrated the ability to find non-directly financial value in anything.

Dude couldn't even find the value in one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

 

[Remathilis]

Twitter was awful before musk and a different kind of awful after him

Your point? Musk didn't bother to keep the good and only made the bad worse.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Your point? Musk didn't bother to keep the good and only made the bad worse.

My point was simply that I have found it awful in both instances