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posted Facebook comments made by D&D designer Jason Tondro, who spoke about his decision to include acknowledgement of outdated views within early versions of Dungeons & Dragons.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