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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

#191
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 500k annualized is what he claims the meaning of the tweet to be. Unless Tesla updates their projections soon, that's probably not a lie.

Nobody's claiming the annualized number is a lie. The claim is the original post is wrongly saying 500k total for the year and wasn't run past someone else like Musk promised he would for all Tesla related statements.

> Nobody's claiming the annualized number is a lie.

I was talking about whether "Musk meant the annualized number." is true or a lie.

> The claim is the original post is wrongly saying 500k total for the year and wasn't run past someone else like Musk promised he would for all Tesla related statements.

The agreement was that he would get approval for posts with material information.

If he's citing a number everyone already knows from the public report, then it's not material information. (except in some kind of unreasonably-broad sense that would make "Tesla makes cars." an offending tweet)

So if he says 500k, and he's talking about the annualized number in the previous public report, then there is a strong argument that he doesn't need approval.

If he says 500k and it's not annualized, then it's a new number, and he does need approval.

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

#192

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.

Incidentally Tesla's new GC has only been on the job for 5 days after the previous GC left two months into the job . https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/20/tesla-replaces-general-couns...

It's possible this isn't a coincidence, the tweet in question seems to have come out just before the last GC left, I wonder if it sparked a conflict.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tweet was not an edit to a pre-approved communication. That rule is irrelevant. The argument is not "this tweet got approved before, so I can edit it however I want". The argument is "the number is already public information, so I can make a new post mentioning it".

> This tweet was not an edit to a pre-approved communication. That is the problem, in a nutshell: it should have been pre-approved - according to the FCC's interpretation of the settlement agreement.

Maybe. But don't confuse different arguments about why. If the tweet needed pre-approval, it's for a reason entirely different from this quote.

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

#194
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been saying for years that Twitter ought to be offering that as a paid-for feature. They don't even have to charge much for it. Even something as simple as "All tweets have a 120 second delay during which time the following users will be pinged, shown the tweet, and given veto powers on it". I'd pay for it just to have my wife be able to say "Really? You want to tweet another picture of the cat? No."

3rd party apps do this.

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

#195
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,…

It's not about malice. It's well known that public statements by corporate officers and other key people can move the market so their statements tend to be scrutinized by all sides, including regulators. Another problem is it's often difficult to prove/disprove if a statement is an honest mistake or a misrepresentation (or even outright lie.) That's why it's so rare for company officials to go 'off script' when making public statements... pretty much everything they say is vetted by legal, PR and pretty much any impacted group in the company to ensure they don't step in it. Walking back / clarifying statements in his role can be much more costly than just keeping silent until you have the facts right.

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

#196
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, you expect that a top representative of a publicly traded company obeys the law on official company channels. E.g. if your job is to trade on Tesla based on newly announced information, ignoring facts from such a message might very well get you in financial trouble if it turns out you shouldn't have ignored it and your clients loose money because of that.

Channels don't matter. Lying to investors does. Private company CEOs can talk shit as long as all the investors know it's shit

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

#197
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's claiming the annualized number is a lie. The claim is the original post is wrongly saying 500k total for the year and wasn't run past someone else like Musk promised he would for all Tesla related statements.

> Nobody's claiming the annualized number is a lie. I was talking about whether "Musk meant the annualized number." is true or a lie. > The claim is the original post is wrongly saying 500k total for the year and wasn't run past someone else like Musk promised he would for all Tesla related statements. The agreement was that he would get approval for posts with material information. If he's citing a number everyone a…

It doesn't matter what he meant, it matters what the statement would be reasonably expected to mean. Saying we'll produce 500k can't reasonably be read as we'll have an annualized rate of 500k, which is why he needed to issue a correction.

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

#198
post #45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about, "helped every piece of news break faster." I knew about every trade during the run up to today's 3pm NHL trade deadline many minutes and sometimes hours before the stories appeared on nhl.com or sportsnet, etc.

> I knew about every trade during the run up to today's 3pm NHL trade deadline many minutes and sometimes hours before the stories appeared on nhl.com or sportsnet, etc. Is that just for entertainment or did you use that information in some way? It's similar to papers or tv stations crowing how they broke a story. So what? Do I really need (or do most people) to know that there is a mass tragedy (only one example) th…

If you want to make money betting on the info, you do.

Breaking a story matters if no one else was looking, but yeah not of everyone was racing.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently we live in a country where the government can murder thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, deny that it ever happened, and profit off of the destruction. But god help you if you make a tweet that is subjectively incorrect.

The government profited? I always hear that it cost 6 trillion or something

government officials and connected firms profited, taxpayers lost out

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

#200
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been saying for years that Twitter ought to be offering that as a paid-for feature. They don't even have to charge much for it. Even something as simple as "All tweets have a 120 second delay during which time the following users will be pinged, shown the tweet, and given veto powers on it". I'd pay for it just to have my wife be able to say "Really? You want to tweet another picture of the cat? No."

I could see from an ideological perspective Twitter's entire mission being to delete the middleman and the moderating PR managers and public statement lawyer sanitation of everything public figures ever say, which was the only way laypeople heard anything a famous person ever said (that or tabloid gossip "overheard"s). I can respect that ideology, but it of course comes with its own set of problems.

Personally I'm amused and ok with famous people facing the consequences of voicing their opinions, and also them getting roasted by normal civilians in public thanks to twitter.

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