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SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

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Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#91
post #64

My knowledge of how publicly traded companies work is very limited, but: Was what he said really that bad? He said: >Tesla made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019 And then later corrected himself with: >Meant to say annualized production rate at end of 2019 probably around 500k, ie 10k cars/week. Deliveries for year still estimated to be about 400k. This seems like a pretty simple mistake to have made,…

Last year Elon made a series of deliberately false statements made with the sole purpose of artificially inflating the stock price of his crime. CEOs have gone to jail for years over misrepresentations less outrageous than Elons'. He was able to avoid prison time and hundreds of millions in fines by agreeing to a slap-on-the-wrist settlement with the SEC that required a small fine and, crucially, that his tweets be reviewed by someone else at the company before they were posted. So that no more material mispresentations would spew forth...like the one the SEC is now saying violates the settlement agreement.

If he wanted to keep tweet vomitting, he could have decided not to settle with the SEC last year and taken his chances.

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#92
Guidance for this year was 350k - 500k. Elon said several times on the call that he thought they could beat the 500k. This is a technicality on not getting approval for a tweet that could unreasonably be interpreted as saying they are definitely hitting 500k 8 months from now. This is stupid.

https://twitter.com/_jameshatfield_/status/11001772987230945...

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#93
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, he was projecting 2019 production publicly, and the SEC cites the first tweet as the projection that violated the original agreement.

Except that was already public information.

Correct. It was in the outlook of the last quarterly:

http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/0b913415-467d-4c0d-be4c-922...

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't need to delete it, but if he is going to post market moving information (like production for 2019 is not 400K but 500K) he'd get the approved by someone else like Tesla's GC.

On the other hand, how is that market-moving given Elon's very public history of stirring the pot? You expect this from him.

I think for most crimes, saying "But I have a well known history of doing this" would make prosecutors less lenient, not more.

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#96
post #26

This is where a software solution might actually help. As an example, I've added some keywords to a script in my IRC client that if they exist the message is stopped by my client. In Elon Musks' case this should be Tesla (and probably some other court mandated muzzles) and should be on their Twitter clients, and other "designated publication channels" that the ruling covers. Why? Because remembering to not do things…

Like Gmail's "undo send" feature? All it does is wait tens seconds to send your message but many people find this to be just enough to back out of dumb statements from time to time.

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#97
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a human being who also happens to be the head of a public corporation. We can't expect every single action he takes at every point to be filtered into legalese. IMO, if he had said this in an earnings call, or presented it in a way that made it seem "official", then I could get the problem, but it's twitter .

According to the company his twitter feed is an official source of information about the company.

So if he created two twitter accounts, ElonMuskCorp and ElonMuskPersonal, would he be in the clear on the 'Personal account?

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#98
post #25

At this point, the board of directors should just demand deletion of his Twitter account. I admire Elon for his vision, and actually also admire his radical style despite of its unpopular image - I watched the video where he smoked pot on the radio show. It was a really amazing conversation about future of humanity. He just needs to stop tweeting. You may say it’s fixing the symptom, but here if we take Twitter away,…

Twitter's value is providing a direct connection from people of note to the masses, bypassing newspaper/TV/radio gatekeepers of yesteryear. You could argue whether that itself is good for society, but it is clear from Twitter's usage that people find it valuable.

> Twitter's value is providing a direct connection from people of note to the masses, bypassing newspaper/TV/radio gatekeepers of yesteryear.

Press releases still exist. Although even then I'd wager the copy writers do a better job of legal due diligence than Musk.

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#99
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like a pretty simple mistake to have made Elon Musk is the head of a public corporation, not a random Twitter user.

He's a human being who also happens to be the head of a public corporation. We can't expect every single action he takes at every point to be filtered into legalese. IMO, if he had said this in an earnings call, or presented it in a way that made it seem "official", then I could get the problem, but it's twitter .

IMO, if he had said this in an earnings call, or presented it in a way that made it seem "official", then I could get the problem, but it's twitter.

As pointed out many times on this thread, Elon had Tesla designate his personal twitter account as an official source of material company information. Ergo, anything he posts to twitter is potentially subject to SEC reporting requirements.

If he didn't want that responsibility tied to his private account, he should have had Tesla create him a Tesla_CEO twitter handle that he could post from instead.

Re: SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't need to delete it, but if he is going to post market moving information (like production for 2019 is not 400K but 500K) he'd get the approved by someone else like Tesla's GC.

It seems like Elon lacks the ability to control his behavior when he can tweet based on a momentary impulse. Elon has many bright ideas but not every notion of his is appropriate for public consumption. He ought to hand over the credentials to a PR or even a law firm so he can send all his tweets through them. And ask them to change the password.

It wouldn't be too hard to give him a twitter clone app that flows through a middleman before going live, git pull requests for twitter if you will.
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