Elon Musk Accused by SEC of Misleading Investors in August Tweet
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of misleading investors when he tweeted that he had funding lined up to take the company private.
The agency said Musk fabricated the claim in his August tweet, which sent Tesla shares higher.
"In truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source," the SEC said in complaint filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, less than two months after Musk's tweet.
The suit seeks an order from a judge barring Musk from serving as an officer or director of a public company, a request often made in SEC lawsuits, as well as unspecified monetary penalties.
Shares fell about 10 percent in after-hour trading on news of the lawsuit. The company, which wasn't sued, and an attorney for Musk didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The SEC has scheduled a press conference for 5 p.m.
The complaint: 1:18-cv-8865 (alt source).
Current (delayed) stock quote: TSLA.
Also at the BBC, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, c|net, and Ars Technica.
[Update: added 20180928_141312 UTC]
The CNBC is reporting Tesla's Musk pulled the plug on a settlement with the SEC at the last minute:
Tesla and the Securities and Exchange Commission were very close to a no-guilt settlement Thursday, reported CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin on Friday, citing sources. But, these people say Musk pulled out of the agreement at the last minute.
Under the terms of the deal, Musk and Tesla would have had to pay a nominal fine, and he would not have had to admit any guilt. However, the settlement would have barred Musk as chairman for two years and would require Tesla to appoint two new independent directors, reported CNBC's David Faber, citing sources.
Musk reportedly refused to sign the deal because he felt that by settling he would not be truthful to himself, and he wouldn't have been able to live with the idea that he agreed to accept a settlement and any blemish associated with that, the sources said.
Tesla was not immediately available for comment.
Musk said Thursday the SEC's allegations are "unjustified" and that he acted in the best interests of investors.
Related Stories
Tesla and CEO Elon Musk will pay $40 million to settle SEC case
Tesla and Chief Executive Elon Musk have settled a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit that alleged the outspoken businessman misled investors about his prospective effort to take the electric-car company private.
Musk and the Palo Alto company agreed to pay a total of $40 million, and he will give up his chairmanship for at least three years. Musk, however, will remain chief executive and retain a seat on the company's board of directors. Tesla, meanwhile, is required to install an independent chairman and add two new board members, according to terms of the settlement, which the SEC announced Saturday.
Musk and Tesla will each pay $20 million to settle the case; both reached the deal without admitting wrongdoing. The company declined to comment.
The SEC charged Musk with fraud Thursday, alleging that his tweets about taking Tesla private — at $420 a share — were "false and misleading." As part of the lawsuit, it asked a federal court to remove him from the company's leadership and ban him from running a public company.
Also at Reuters.
SEC Settlement announcement.
Previously: Elon Musk Considers Taking Tesla Private
Elon Musk Accused by SEC of Misleading Investors in August Tweet [Updated]
Elon Musk Reaches Settlement in SEC Tweet Battle:
Elon Musk has reached a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the two parties said in a legal filing on Friday. The new agreement provides much more detailed guidance about when tweets and other public statements by Musk must be approved by Tesla lawyers.
Musk's original deal with the SEC was announced last September. It required Musk to obtain pre-approval for tweets that "contain or could contain" information that's material—legal jargon for information that's significant to shareholders. While the SEC expected Musk to begin regularly clearing tweets with lawyers, Musk interpreted this language as giving him significant discretion to decide for himself which tweets contained material information. As a result, he didn't seek legal review for any tweets in the first few months the agreement was in effect.
[...]Under the new rules, Musk must get a Tesla securities lawyer's sign off on tweets (and other communications) regarding Tesla's finances, its production and delivery numbers, new lines of business, sales projections, proposed mergers, fundraising efforts, regulatory decisions, and several other types of information.
The SEC says that if the judge signs off on these new terms, the SEC will drop its request for Musk to be held in contempt. In other words, the SEC seems to be satisfied with getting Musk to start seeking legal review for his tweets the way the agency thought Musk had been doing since last time. The SEC is not seeking to punish Musk further for his February tweet.
Given how well Elon Musk followed the intent of the prior ruling, I wonder how closely he will follow this ruling?
Previously:
Funding for Tesla to Go Private Could Come From Saudis; Lawsuits and SEC Scrutiny Increase
SEC Reportedly Subpoenas Tesla Over Take-Private Tweet
Tesla Facing Criminal Probe
Elon Musk Accused by SEC of Misleading Investors in August Tweet
SEC Settlement: Elon Musk Resigns as Chairman of Tesla, Stays as CEO, $40 Million in Fines Paid
Elon Musk Isn’t on His Twitter Leash Yet, So He’s Taunting the SEC
Elon Musk tweet wipes $14bn off Tesla's value:
The tweet also knocked $3bn off Mr Musk's own stake in Tesla as investors promptly bailed out of the company.
"Tesla stock price is too high imo," he said, one of several tweets that included a vow to sell his possessions.
In other tweets, he said his girlfriend was mad at him, while another simply read: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light of consciousness."
In 2018, a tweet about Tesla's future on the New York stock market led to regulators fining him $20m and agreeing to have all further posts on the platform pre-screened by lawyers.
Previously:
(2019-04-27) Elon Musk Reaches Settlement in SEC Tweet Battle
(2018-10-06) Elon Musk Isn't on His Twitter Leash Yet, So He's Taunting the SEC
(2018-09-30) SEC Settlement: Elon Musk Resigns as Chairman of Tesla, Stays as CEO, $40 Million in Fines Paid
(2018-09-28) Elon Musk Accused by SEC of Misleading Investors in August Tweet [Updated]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @08:48AM
https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/premarket [nasdaq.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @08:52AM (3 children)
Elon Musk, lucky visionary, got a little ahead of himself. We have things like SEC partly to prevent bullshit communication and other unstable leaders in public companies. Elon these days looks like someone looking for a fight with everyone. Accusing people of being pedophiles because they called his stupid idea for what it was. Tweeting like the idiot-in-chief. He wanted a lawsuit? Well, here you go Mr. Musk.
Hopefully this will be a wakeup call that prevents the meltdown he was already heading towards. It's almost like the dude didn't grow up properly yet or is having a mid-life crises or simply can't handle failure. And I say hopefully, because we need Mr. Musk to continue with Space X much more than we need Tesla. Tesla competitors are now the major auto companies, and these have much more experience in all aspects of the business.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 28 2018, @12:33PM (2 children)
Including how to fail for decades in a row. I hope Tesla still has some life in it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @12:45PM (1 child)
"We have things like SEC partly to prevent bullshit communication and other unstable leaders in public companies."
That was a joke, right?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 28 2018, @11:45PM
Depending on your point of view, it's the best or worst kind of joke, the kind where they don't realize they're jokes.
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @09:58AM (12 children)
Nothing to see here, move along.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @12:56PM (2 children)
Another Musky parrot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @06:11PM (1 child)
And hello to you to mobbed up broker douche!
So exactly how much of your newspapermen friends money did you loose? Must be hard now, having to do your astroturfing yourself. I imagine a lot of them don't talk to you anymore. Boo Hoo.
Have a nice day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @11:15PM
Were you born stupid or did you experience a traumatic brain injury?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Friday September 28 2018, @03:16PM (8 children)
Another Anonymous Coward who is so stupid that I'm amazed they figured out how to use a computer well enough to even post.
Heaven forbid you go past your pathetic tribal knee-jerk reactions and look at the actual facts.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday September 28 2018, @03:49PM (7 children)
And it's not like the facts are complicated. He made a tweet stating openly a source of money for investors that didn't exist.
As an aside, Tesla would probably have been fine in the long run if he hadn't brought the Silicon Valley attitude of "growth of less than 100% per year is bad for startup, also everything must be automated" which is pretty much exactly the wrong approach for a luxury car company.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 28 2018, @04:55PM (6 children)
> And it's not like the facts are complicated. He made a tweet stating openly a source of money for investors that didn't exist.
The Tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."
People keep forgetting the most important word, because of the other two important words.
There is no question that the first sentence is true. The second one is not, but does the second sentence constitute a criminal offense, when the second word of the tweet makes the whole thing a hypothetical ?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday September 28 2018, @05:59PM (5 children)
No, the critical words are absolutely "funding secured", since, you know, that's the fabrication.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 28 2018, @06:05PM (4 children)
"Hey, I talked to Apple because they want to take us private at $420. They have money."
The money part is not the important part.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday September 28 2018, @06:15PM (3 children)
"The money part is not the important part" is a very strange sentence to say with respect to capital investments. I cannot fathom what mental steps led you to make up a new quote that would also be fraud, and think it explains anything.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 28 2018, @06:29PM (2 children)
I'm pointing out that "funding secured" does not mean for The Street what it means for someone who puts "considering" in their announcement.
The street reads "funding secured" as "papers signed, approvals finalized for purchase", while the word "considering", and all his follow-up communications, clearly indicate his strong desire, but not a done deal.
If he had said my second phrase, people would have focused on the intention, instead of jumping on the terminology they are used to, not understanding he didn't mean it as they are used to reading it, and missing the context which was explicit in the first sentence.
He misjudged them, they misread him.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday September 28 2018, @06:47PM (1 child)
Gonna have to level with you: that's dumb as hell, words mean things.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 28 2018, @07:30PM
Yep, that's indeed dumb as hell: words mean different things to people who specialize in different things.
To a big-picture guy who specializes in missing deadlines, "secured" means "I know how to make it happen, eventually". To The Street, it means "locked down and signed"
That confusion of normal meaning vs specialist meaning happens very often with legalese, and recently with NSAspeak ("collect", remember?)
Twitter skips over the line, which would have normally been crossed by a press released triple-checked by Legal and the CFO, who speak Street. A CEO should know better, but that's still what happened.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday September 28 2018, @10:45AM
Hey gen x and millennials, pretty nice possible futures you have there... shame if something happened to it...
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @12:27PM (15 children)
Given the length limitation, I've always regarded twitter as utterly useless in transmitting any ideas of value. That simple fact is apparently lost on the SEC. Perhaps they should do their press release via twitter eh? See how that goes. In a nutshell, what the SEC is saying here, is that a message written on a bathroom wall in crayon (the IRL equivolent of twitter) is sufficient to be considered legal advice. That says more about the SEC than it does about Musk.
Are we ever going to see a day, when government business is run by adults?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @12:52PM (13 children)
Read the SEC complaint. Tesla submitted a form saying that Musk's Twitter was an official source of company news.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday September 28 2018, @01:45PM (12 children)
"Read the SEC complaint. Tesla submitted a form saying that Musk's Twitter was an official source of company news."
Thank you for that info. That's a shame. I think of Twitter as a place for people to blurt things at random will. As such I don't take tweets so seriously. I thought Musk's tweet was obviously a joke based on both the number 420's significance, and maybe some 420 was involved in the neural process leading up to the tweet. https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=27032&page=1&cid=719648#719648 [soylentnews.org]
I wish people would stop being so absolute and literal and think about context more in life.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 28 2018, @02:45PM (11 children)
I agree with you that no Tweet should be taken seriously, ever. (IMVHO they shouldn't even be read.... but I'm just a hater there.) But even if it was a joke as the CEO he has a responsibility to know that investors can and do hang on his every word. He can't just do what he wants when he wants - not if it ends up damaging the company. Especially "jokes" which any reasonable person would know would make the stock price twitch - and this one made it "twitch" 11% from Friday to Monday.
And if you look at that Tweet [twitter.com], and more importantly his responses just on the first page, he makes several responses to several people that appear completely serious. Among them:
"Shareholders could either sell at 420 or hold shares & go private"
"Absolutely. Am super appreciative of Tesla shareholders. Will ensure their prosperity in any scenario."
"My hope is *all* current investors remain with Tesla even if we're private. Would create special purpose fund enabling anyone to stay with Tesla. Already do this with Fidelity's SpaceX investment."
Does that sound like somebody who just just kidding? Or reinforcement of it?
And the kicker was the "Funding Secured" lie - the former was probably good enough but the latter seals the deal that he told an outright lie which caused price to jump (whether it should have or not) - no better than a pump-and-dump email.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday September 28 2018, @04:45PM (1 child)
Please know, I'm very grounded in reality and I get what you're saying. I'll just repeat myself: "I wish people would stop being so absolute and literal and think about context more in life."
Perhaps a limitation I have is that I have a good friend who really "gets" things. He understands context. He and I share a somewhat cynical / sarcastic view of pretty much everything in life. Part of that means we never take anything at surface value. We always look at context, for example.
When I heard of / read Musk's infamous tweet my first reaction was: he's just tweeting. To me it's like someone who talks to themselves, stuff just babbles out. My second reaction was: Musk is working 120 hours a week- he's so sleep-deprived he's sleep-talking. The third reaction was: maybe he's high. Forth: maybe he's sick of stock market pressure and wants to see what people think about him taking his baby private.
In fact, a proper reaction by the investment community would be: "okay, Musk tweeted that, but it's illegal to say those kinds of things, reveal that info, etc., so I better not ACT on it until something more official happens."
I just wish everyone would lighten up. The world has enough problems without people taking things so seriously and escalating problems. Wouldn't deescalation be better?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 28 2018, @05:06PM
> "I wish people would stop being so absolute and literal and think about context more in life."
The problem is that if you're in for a few hundred millions shorting TSLA, when the CEO announces that he's got "funding secured" to raise the price one final time by 20%, you HAVE to react.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday September 28 2018, @04:52PM (4 children)
I'll add: if SEC presses this, forces Musk out, maybe even imprisons him, I'm worried about the domino-effect. A lot of people will lose jobs, stock / investment money gone, overall productivity lost and resources / factories will be wasted, and it will be yet another big hit to the US and somewhat world economy.
I'd rather SEC make a formal policy: tweets are NO longer formal business announcements.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 28 2018, @05:22PM (1 child)
Commenting on both of the above.... I really do agree with you that people should learn to chill more, have better critical thinking skills, and that Twitter is a hyper-poor medium for communication of... well, anything, but particularly things which affect peoples lives including markets. Your take on the situation was a wise one IMO. And I sympathize with the idea that if one is basing major investment decision based on tweets there should be some level of caveat emptor. Our get-there-first-get-it-now-make-the-most-profit-possible culture causes real damage too as well as having benefits.
Reading the complaint, though, the government alleges two things that make me question the innocence of this.
First, they allege that Musk was in fact pursuing ideas to take the company private and had discussed same with the Tesla Board. So it wasn't like Musk was making something up out of whole cloth, and while 420 is a very steep premium indeed to where Tesla's price was it wasn't on the level of "one billionkajillionfarfillionquinashabalabarillion DOLLARS". Apparently a reporter even sent an email asking him if it was a pot joke or not. While one can speculate all day about motive, maybe he was actually trying to make that deal crystallize by having his Saudi interests read that there was funding already - to prod them to want to get something signed immediately. (If he'd been successful at such a strategy it still might have been not cricket, but probably a lot less bloody).
The other aspect is this 8K filing [tesla.com] where Tesla itself stated that Musk's Twitter pronouncements could be used to announce Tesla material information to the public. An investor thus should be able to rely on it, silly as it was. And the government incorporated that as part of its complaint to establish that this wasn't just Elon Musk saying something off the cuff (even though that carries risk, too).
It is a sad world, though, when there are those who rely on Twitter to understand what the powerful are thinking.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:08AM
I wouldn't count on the situation improving, or people having better critical thinking skills.
Twitter is a medium for information. The design of Twitter might influence (degrade) the quality of the information, but if you are trying to make a quick buck, you probably wouldn't ignore it. And really, what was a misguided tweet became a major news story, because it was "official" and the premise seemed plausible (reefer 😉 to the events that happened in the week or so before the tweet).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 28 2018, @05:28PM (1 child)
BTW, I reread and got that you got that bit about the 8K already -- didn't reread your parent and wanted to get the link to the actual 8K as well. But I do know you're capable of reading parent posts. ;)
Again, you're right, though that it is a waste. It should be an object lesson to all large publicly-held companies that they should be VERY careful in designating official channels of communication and who has those rights (including the CEO). (And Governments and their officials for that matter).
I wonder how much actual thought Elon Musk put into that tweet.... was it really just an off the cuff feeling?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday September 28 2018, @06:19PM
Thanks for a great discussion. I agree on all points. As I've mentioned elsewhere on SN, and gotten downmodded (??), I'm a bit of a freedom of speech advocate. But for freedom of speech to work, listeners have to be less reactionary, and that's all I'm saying. I don't read twitter at all, other than tweets quoted somewhere in the news, but I've seen enough to know it's like Joe's blog, or someone's online journal. I guess I'm a bit surprised that a tweet has so much power. In fact, one of the only twitter accounts I glanced at a few times was "boredelonmusk". To me it all just seems like the homeless person talking to themselves. So to answer your question, I tend to think Musk didn't think about how seriously it would be taken, and I blame it on his horribly sleep-deprived state, and now it seems that some 420 could have been involved, so I'll call it an "off the puff feeling". (Popeye laughing sounds...)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 28 2018, @11:57PM (3 children)
But not the responsibility to care. Sorry, I don't think a CEO should carefully parse their words just because there are stupid people in the world.
And I don't even care if a CEO routinely says such things. The shareholders can police it themselves. I don't think there's a serious case for fraud here and the SEC should just get lost.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Saturday September 29 2018, @01:25AM (2 children)
A CEO should carefully parse every word they speak to the public. That's one of the reasons they get the big bucks.
What he ended up doing was causing price manipulation by deception, a form of securities fraud. The SEC were treating him with kid gloves compared to what they'd hit someone else with.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:21AM
Or we can just not pander to fools. Sorry, I don't buy that a few ambiguous tweets constitute securities fraud or should do so. I get that relaxing such rules will result in some increase in fraud and whatnot. Increases in human freedom typically result in some increases in human bad behavior too. But such laws have perversely resulted in reducing the flow of information from CEOs and other business leaders to potential investors and customers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 29 2018, @03:24AM
Also, the problem is that this isn't necessarily a trait of a good CEO. If your industry is accounting or public relations then a shoot-from-the-hip CEO can be very damaging to the company. But there's many industries where key skills are communicating clearly and making decisions fast and decisively. A cautious CEO who is too worried about communication liability can be very harmful in those cases.
My view is that rules like what you allude to result in a lot of harm to the business world, such as encouraging a poisonous atmosphere of non-communication and creating a generation of risk-adverse business leaders.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Friday September 28 2018, @03:24PM
This is how you contort your mind to be a Musk fan? You do realize that Twitter is a bathroom wall but that Musk is writing on it all the time and also PGP signing it and putting the Tesla corporate logo on it?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @02:03PM (10 children)
I just read the complaint.
The part I like is where they claim the stock rose by 10% and then 5 lines later claim that stockholders experienced a loss. Really? A 10% gain... is a loss? Who knew?
They also acknowledge in the complaint that the shorts typically weren't stockholders, and that Musk had clearly stated before that he intended to burn the shorts. If somebody has openly declared malice for the actions you are taking, it is quite a stretch to assume that lying to you is somehow unfair. since they already told you they intended to confound you.
This whole thing is bad for the markets in general, because if the SEC wins, well I don't even want to talk about it. (Think Howard Hueghes' congressional testimony) But if the SEC looses publicly, it will negatively impact the integrity of the SEC. Which means when they are obliged to investigate the next Bernie Madoff, nobody will believe them.
It is really hard to look at this and see it as anything other than the SEC acting as a cats paw. The complaint clearly articulates a destructive intent, more than it does an interest in restitution.
So the story goes: A bunch of mobbed up chop shops, the most corrupt corporations in the country and some of the most dipshit attention seeking journalists conspire together to crash Tesla. They all loose... Badly. Then having lost, they tap their congressmen, and get the SEC to implement a second round legal rape to make up for the fact that the market rape didn't suceed.
Which is more plausible? The story coming out of the mass media, or mine?
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 28 2018, @02:58PM (7 children)
Not hard.
Tesla makes the announcement on a Friday (i think....)
Next trading day stock jumps 10% higher. While correlation ain't causation, I don't know anybody seriously arguing that it wasn't Tesla's tweet that did that.
So you have Tesla's high price at $354.98 on August 6 from a $345 start, an average price of on August 7 of $387.48 (people paid a bunch more for Tesla stock thinking it would be worth $420 - it only takes one trader) on a $343 start, and it has been sliding down ever since but by August 8 a high of $382 on a start of $369. (And it's been sliding ever since...)
So no, the official story that an investor believed what Musk tweeted as fact, acted on it in a rush and lost because Musk was lying, is far more plausible than a conspiracy theory with no factual evidence.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 28 2018, @03:28PM
Musk's announcement and tweet, sorry. (Musk is Tesla CEO, so it's not entirely wrong to suggest "Tesla" tweeted it... who doesn't think of them as one and the same? - the whole point of why it's an SEC enforceable problem anyway.) And it was a Tuesday, not a Friday, my bad.
But the point still holds.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @03:39PM (4 children)
"I don't know anybody seriously arguing that it wasn't Tesla's tweet that did that."
A gain in stock price, isn't a loss. In fact increasing the stocks value is the CEO's job. And if the stock has been sliding since then so what? Fluctuations are normal. Crashes are engineered.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 28 2018, @05:17PM (1 child)
> A gain in stock price, isn't a loss.
It'a loss if you're shorting. Shorts add no value, but they are still "holding". Now, that's not actionable, but that makes them angry, and they have money to pay lawyers to retaliate.
> In fact increasing the stocks value is the CEO's job.
Indeed, but with hyperbolic statements and unicornic powerpoints. Not with technically incorrect tweets.
> And if the stock has been sliding since then so what? Fluctuations are normal.
Shorts want it to slide, and they accept the fluctuations and occasional losses/gain. But many had to rush to liquidate to avoid getting trapped by a sudden 20% rise and privatization. Lost a lot. Find someone else to blame. Unleash lawyers/SEC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:25PM
"Now, that's not actionable"
Note that while you and I acknowledge that, almost every mainstream reporter did not. And in most cases the were slinging wild insinuations that this is in fact actionable. So they were really just astroturfing for the brokers who were telling everybody to short. And that itself IS actionable. What the chop shops were doing here was effectively a reverse pump and dump.
"Not with technically incorrect tweets"
Given the length limitation, I would say that "technically correct tweet" is an oxymoron. Any other medium would have allowed at least a modicum of scope in the communication. Without context, almost any statement is mostly meaningless.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 28 2018, @11:06PM (1 child)
Causing gains by lies is not a CEO's job. Spin that how you like it's still true - causing an unwarranted gain in the stock is still not legal.
The point being anyone who bought stock on Musk's comment bought into a lie by Musk, and that is prosecutable.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:31PM
"Causing gains by lies is not a CEO's job"
Clearly you've never worked for a big corporation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @03:47PM
"acted on it in a rush and lost because Musk was lying"
If you acted on it in a rush, then your a speculator, not an investor. Really there should be different rules for day traders. If 50% of your portfolio is held less than 6 months, you should get less protection. The SEC shouldn't be in the vegas-backrooming business.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @03:00PM (1 child)
That Tesla misled investors, and now is getting slapped by the SEC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @03:52PM
until somebody puts some facial recognition to work on wallstreet, and discovers news executives having conversations with brokers, right before stories like this one break.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)
Tesla stock is down? Time to buy! I wouldn't mind doubling my money again : )
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @05:46PM
THat's what I thought about crypto in May! Surely it must come back! Surely!