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Tesla is gaining a lot of free publicity from this.
To what end though? Is there anyone plausibly in the market for a Tesla car that doesn’t know about the company and cars at this point? I’d guess their unaided awareness within target market must be over 50% and aided over 95%.
What does he really risk if found guilty of contempt? I don't think the SEC is going to settle again
https://www.economist.com/business/2018/09/28/the-sec-threat...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not really paranoia when you factor in how much short interest the $TSLA stock has, there are literally tens of billions of dollars to be gained if the people with these short positions can discredit or shift public opinion on musk
That's fairly minuscule, really. Short sellers can't make Musk bash the SEC or call people pedos; that's on him. Musk himself has $55.8B in compensation tied to market cap at stake, which gives him equally self-interested reasons to balance things out. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/tesla-shareholders-approve-e...
But they certainly can engineer a fake rumor of an SEC requesting contempt of court by manipulating journalists and forging documents, if sufficiently motivated. Consider the SuperMicro story submitted to mainstream publications last year that was obviously fake and caused a massive decline in their stock. I don't think it's above a sophisticated actor to socially engineer a journalist in service of a "short and distort" campaign. Even Jim Cramer laid out the typical tactics of a short attack: get a short position open and then spread false rumors to a "bozo reporter" [0][1]
I'm no big Elon Musk fan, but the funny thing is -- correct me if I'm missing something -- I can't seem to find any evidence that the SEC ever published the complaint[2] documents supplied by a USA today journalist on the sec.gov website. Searching for "Case 1:18-cv-08865-AJN" only brings up the original settlement from October 2018. That alone gives me pause.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6gxPCurDJs&t=1m43s
[1]: https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/2918951-g-hudson/1026551-...
[2]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5750664-Show-Cause.h...
The legacy manufacturers have all caught the bug, batteries are achieving mass scale in China, and electric vehicles have irreversible momentum.
Mission accomplished.
>Of more concern to Tesla investors: What if he knows something they don’t know about the company’s financial future — and is hoping to hang any failure on the nasty, overreaching regulators rather than his own dubious management skills? That seems very possible. I think the reality of scaling up Tesla to live up to its valuation might be too daunting for Elon to handle. It might even be impossible. EV sales as a % o…
What’s surprising about it?
>Of more concern to Tesla investors: What if he knows something they don’t know about the company’s financial future — and is hoping to hang any failure on the nasty, overreaching regulators rather than his own dubious management skills? That seems very possible. I think the reality of scaling up Tesla to live up to its valuation might be too daunting for Elon to handle. It might even be impossible. EV sales as a % o…
This is what I used to think, but every year the "Tesla killers" fail to kill, or even wound. I never even hear about the other EV's by themselves, only as the competition to Tesla. Anybody who watches the news would have known that the Model 3 was a colossal failure. But it wasn't. It was just 6 months late, which is not bad given the scale of the project. The narrative is just not reality here. Tesla has a head start on the industry. That doesn't guarantee anything, but I think that it's a bigger advantage to Tesla than it would be to any other car company because one of Elon Musk's strengths (Spacex too) is iteration speed.
Last I heard they got the price down to $45K, so they are in striking distance of the $35K target and won't stop there. EV's are mechanically simpler than gas powered cars. Once the technology and economies of scale are there, they will be cheaper. And I don't see any other company in a better position to get there first.
Edit: Predicting that the established players being the ones to take the lead in a new technology sounds like common sense, but it isn't:
> It's likely to be the established electronics companies who are good at making electronics that take the lead in semi-conductor manufacturing.
> It's likely to be the established mail order companies who are good at delivery logistics that take the lead in online retail.
> It's likely to be the established taxi companies who are good at running taxi fleets (and have a legal monopoly) that take the lead in ride sharing apps.
If the pattern holds (which is not by any means guaranteed), Tesla has more to fear from a yet to be founded startup than it does from the legacy car manufacturers.
>Of more concern to Tesla investors: What if he knows something they don’t know about the company’s financial future — and is hoping to hang any failure on the nasty, overreaching regulators rather than his own dubious management skills? That seems very possible. I think the reality of scaling up Tesla to live up to its valuation might be too daunting for Elon to handle. It might even be impossible. EV sales as a % o…
Whether it's for personality reasons or for the sake of keeping his other companies well respected, is he unwilling to let the public lose confidence in him and/or his projects?
My guess is he doesn't care that much about our opinions of him, personally and professionally.
He might be picking a fight with the SEC simply because he can.
There's something to be said for having "FU money" and using it, in the near-literal sense.