Elon Musk's Twitter deal contributed to Tesla’s negative sentiment, according to Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley sampled a few Tesla investors and found what Wall Street has long posited: Chief Executive Elon Musk's involvement with Twitter Inc. has contributed to negative sentiment in the stock.

In late October, Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, leading a series of controversial decisions and presiding over waves of layoffs and resignations of top executives as well as rank and file employees. He also sold Tesla TSLA shares to fund the deal and save the social-media company.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said that the survey results reinforced his views about the negative impact of the Twitter saga on Tesla and could cause a negative downside skew to Tesla fundamentals. Jefferies says that the China EV honeymoon is over, and the stock of XPeng has been downgraded.

In his note, Jonas said that we see a window of buying opportunity near our $150 bear case. The analyst maintained a buy rating on the stock and a price target of $330, which is an upside of more than 80%.

In the past couple of months, Tesla has lost $500 billion of market cap. The stock has gone up about 20% since the Twitter deal went through on October 28th.

Morgan Stanley received 43 responses from the survey, which was distributed to an unidentified number of institutional investors and industry experts.

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With Tesla's elevated valuation and rising risk of revisions amid potential demand challenges, he views the current risk reward on the stock as more balanced, though still modestly negative, according to analyst Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein. We worry about higher rates and slower consumer spending, which could affect higher valuation stocks, such as Tesla, which is why we worry about the potential for broader market pressure, according to Sacconaghi.

One of the few Tesla bears left, the analyst kept the equivalent of a sell rating on the shares and a $150 price target, representing a downside of about 18%.

The stock of Tesla has lost more than 40% this year, which would be its worst year, and compares with losses of around 17% for the S&P 500 index. SPX, the shares fell below $200 for the first time in two years and remained below that threshold on November 7.