Elon Musk announced Telsa is cutting the price of the Model S to $69,420 the same day competitor Lucid Motors revealed the price of its cheaper Air sedan
- Tesla will reduce the price of its Model S sedan to $69,420, the company's CEO, Elon Musk, tweeted Wednesday.
- The move came the same day that Lucid Motors, a luxury-EV startup, announced that its base Air sedan will cost $69,900 after federal tax incentives.
- Musk said the price change would occur "tonight," but it's unclear if he was serious or not.
After slashing the cost of the Model S earlier this week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced plans for yet another price drop on Wednesday, but it's still not clear if he's serious this time around.
Tesla will reduce the MSRP of its flagship luxury sedan to $69,420 "tonight," the CEO tweeted on Wednesday.
If the change comes to bear, the starting MSRP of a Tesla Model S will have dropped by $5,570 this week alone. On Tuesday, Tesla trimmed the sedan's sticker price by $3,000 for the "long range" and "performance" models.
Musk's tweet came the same day that Lucid Motors, an up-and-coming challenger to Tesla in the luxury-EV space, announced that the base version of its Air sedan will cost $69,900 after the $7,500 US federal tax credit. At a release event in September, Lucid said the entry-level Air would start somewhere around $80,000, but didn't reveal detailed pricing until Wednesday.
According to Lucid, the base-model Air will have a single motor, 480 horsepower, and a 406-mile range, beating out the range of the Model S by just four miles.
The numbers 69 and 420, the latter of which is a reference to pot-smoking culture, have become memes among Tesla's fans and for Musk himself. In July, Tesla began selling short shorts — to poke fun at short sellers — which cost $69.420 per pair.
But Musk's fondness for the number 420 has landed him in hot water in the past. In 2018, Musk tweeted that he had secured the funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share, sparking a US Securities and Exchange Commission probe that resulted in a $40 million settlement from Musk and Tesla.
Tesla did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.