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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

#291

Post by gamblor956 »

zaroth wrote: post #285
gamblor956 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump's twitter statements have actually been used in court to strike down several of his executive actions...

Only in rulings that were later overturned, AFAIK.

The rulings I am referring to still stand...

Several of the courts hearing DACA cases upheld the law, in at least one instance solely because of Trump's tweets established a racial motivation rather than a policy motivation for terminating the program.

The Muslim ban was heavily modified after courts repeatedly struck it down based on Trump's anti-Muslim tweets. The final version was designed to address the issues raised in the original rulings. It is limited to countries like Iran and Syria which are openly hostile to the US, and countries like Yemen and Somalia which have contributed a large portion of the membership of terrorist groups like Al Queada and ISIS. Two of the countries were added to that list Venezuela and North Korea) solely because they aren't Muslim. Persons on this list are feasibly national security concerns, which is just enough of a justification to uphold the travel ban on legal grounds.

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

#292

Post by gamblor956 »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #167
gamblor956 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because remembering to not do things is a restraint that is extremely mentally burdensome and thus difficult to get correct 100% of the time. When you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, getting paid millions in stock comp to run that company, you don't get to use the excuse "it's mentally burdensome". The whole reason they're in that position, getting paid those obscene amounts, is that they're supposed to…

Why are you bawking at OP's software solution, in favor of a much more complicated software solution?

The solution I favor is the one that Musk agreed to in his legal settlement with the SEC: have a human review his tweets before he hits the post button. No additional software required. If Tesla wants, they can overengineer a solution like they did with the Alien Dreadnought, but there's a zero-cost solution already available to them.

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

#293

Post by rchaud »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #236
spectramax wrote: post #3

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 is a giant customer service system. It’s more effective than sitting on hold waiting for a giant company to ignore you. One reasonable tweet about an issue and usually a customer service rep reaches out. I tweeted about how a company saved Christmas for our family with a last minute furniture delivery. We were going to take a secondary choice on color for that item to arrive on time. The CEO of the company go…

> Twitter is a giant customer service system.

Only if there's a good PR opportunity to be had, which is exactly the case you described.

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

#294

Post by SatvikBeri »

simplicio wrote: post #202
SatvikBeri wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No – Musk got a slap on the wrist ($20MM) compared to the market movement he caused, and none of that money goes to investors. The tweet moved Tesla's stock by $30/share, or temporarily added over 4 billion dollars to its market cap. It wouldn't really be possible to determine exactly who was damaged by his tweets, so no direct restitution is possible.

The movement in the market cap is 4 billion, but the actual damage done was presumably much less than that, and was just to people who bought the stock during the brief period it was artificially inflated. In anycase, this article seems to disagree with you that the money wasn't paid out to investors: ( https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/29/17918252/elon-musk-tesla-... )

> In anycase, this article seems to disagree with you that the money wasn't paid out to investors: (https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/29/17918252/elon-musk-tesla-...)

Didn't realize they were planning to pay that out to investors, thanks for the correction.

The short-sellers also lost money due to Musk's fraud, though admittedly that's a small fraction of volume.

To get an estimate of the damage done, the price went up by ~$40 share, with ~30 million shares traded. Let's assume the average buyer bought at the midpoint, so they lost $20/share. That's still $600 million transferred from people who believed Musk to people who doubted him – 15 times larger than the total fine to Musk + Tesla.

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

#295

Post by dalbasal »

spectramax wrote: post #3

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,…

Basically, he needs a pepper pots.

Incidentally, I think we should have referendums (local, national, scotland..) to ban leaders from twitter. Maybe Jack Dorsey could be sold on this.

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

#296

Post by Dylan16807 »

sokoloff wrote: post #284
Dylan16807 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If he's citing a number everyone already knows from the public report, then it's not material information. The production and sales figures of a car maker are always material information, IMO. Under the facts you posit, they would not be non-public or novel information, but they would still be material information. Even with that, he was not re-communicating previously issued guidance unchanged. Even with that and…

> they would not be non-public or novel information, but they would still be material information.

Well I attempted to address that. Do you think a tweet of "Tesla makes cars." would violate the agreement?

I'm not joking or being rhetorical when I ask that. The answer could be "yes", but in that case I feel like the agreement was written to be intentionally misleading because it should just say "any mention of Tesla".

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

#297

Post by zebraflask »

joeyspn wrote: post #61
slouch wrote: 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.

^ This I recently read a group of high profile journalists (mainstream media) stating that "Twitter is where we get the news from"... Twitter has become a sort of real-time news agency. If you follow the correct profiles in your niche/sector not even Reuters can beat the speed of 95% of the events. If there's a newsworthy event, chances are it's first on twitter than in any other media outlet.

Exactly.

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

#298

Post by sokoloff »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #296
sokoloff wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he's citing a number everyone already knows from the public report, then it's not material information. The production and sales figures of a car maker are always material information, IMO. Under the facts you posit, they would not be non-public or novel information, but they would still be material information. Even with that, he was not re-communicating previously issued guidance unchanged. Even with that and…

> they would not be non-public or novel information, but they would still be material information. Well I attempted to address that. Do you think a tweet of "Tesla makes cars." would violate the agreement? I'm not joking or being rhetorical when I ask that. The answer could be "yes", but in that case I feel like the agreement was written to be intentionally misleading because it should just say "any mention of Tesla"…

> Do you think a tweet of "Tesla makes cars." would violate the agreement? I'm not joking or being rhetorical when I ask that.

I would agree that particular statement is so utterly obvious and completely devoid of news content as to not violate the agreement. However a statement that "Tesla is going to begin shipping a new model of car" or "Tesla is going to begin shipping the Tesla truck" or "Tesla is going into the solar business by bailing out my other company" or other statements would be material (and therefore subject to pre-approval).

Note that "Tesla makes cars" is itself materially different from "Tesla expects to ship around 500K cars in 2019" (even before considering that the former is true and the latter is false).

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

#299

Post by Dylan16807 »

sokoloff wrote: post #298
Dylan16807 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would not be non-public or novel information, but they would still be material information. Well I attempted to address that. Do you think a tweet of "Tesla makes cars." would violate the agreement? I'm not joking or being rhetorical when I ask that. The answer could be "yes", but in that case I feel like the agreement was written to be intentionally misleading because it should just say "any mention of Tesla"…

> Do you think a tweet of "Tesla makes cars." would violate the agreement? I'm not joking or being rhetorical when I ask that. I would agree that particular statement is so utterly obvious and completely devoid of news content as to not violate the agreement. However a statement that "Tesla is going to begin shipping a new model of car" or "Tesla is going to begin shipping the Tesla truck" or "Tesla is going into the…

> However a statement that "Tesla is going to begin shipping a new model of car" or "Tesla is going to begin shipping the Tesla truck" or "Tesla is going into the solar business by bailing out my other company" or other statements would be material (and therefore subject to pre-approval).

If those are all things that were in a recent public report, I don't see a difference. They're all public information about the company, and they all matter. Anything in the quarterly report should count as fully obvious in a "reasonable investor" context.

> Note that "Tesla makes cars" is itself materially different from "Tesla expects to ship around 500K cars in 2019" (even before considering that the former is true and the latter is false).

How so? If anything, "Tesla makes cars" is vastly more important than their production expectation. Is the different that it's in future tense? That again would only make his tweet less material.

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

#300

Post by sokoloff »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #299
sokoloff wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think a tweet of "Tesla makes cars." would violate the agreement? I'm not joking or being rhetorical when I ask that. I would agree that particular statement is so utterly obvious and completely devoid of news content as to not violate the agreement. However a statement that "Tesla is going to begin shipping a new model of car" or "Tesla is going to begin shipping the Tesla truck" or "Tesla is going into the…

> However a statement that "Tesla is going to begin shipping a new model of car" or "Tesla is going to begin shipping the Tesla truck" or "Tesla is going into the solar business by bailing out my other company" or other statements would be material (and therefore subject to pre-approval). If those are all things that were in a recent public report, I don't see a difference. They're all public information about the co…

That they were in a recent (but not within 2 days) public report is not in compliance with the prior consent decree entered into with the SEC from his prior misleading tweets in the late summer of 2018 which required the company to institute and executives to follow a policy designed to prevent such misleading tweets in the future. The company elected to enact a policy that clearly requires any edits to previously released/approved material to be re-approved and any disclosures more than 2 days after the approval to be re-approved. It is obvious that Musk violated that policy.

The filing is a very quick and clear read (probably less than 5 minutes to understand the essence of their straightforward case): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5750664-Show-Cause.h...

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