It is interesting to note that the price Musk mentioned was $420 per share while the stock closed at just under $730 per share today and was as high as $969 (EDIT: actually more like $900, see computerex's comment below) per share before the Coronavirus selloffs began. I point this out not to defend Musk (he is often an idiot, especially on social media), but to point out that the people still angry about this are likely Tesla shorts and day traders. Anyone who is long on Tesla likely couldn't care less.
The problem with this lawsuit is not that Musk is innocent; the problem is that shareholder lawsuits against companies simply transfer money from the company to the lawyers, and to shareholders who sold their stock between discovering the fraud and disclosing it (a relatively small subset of the supposed 'class'). Shareholder lawsuits against executives would be a better way of policing fraud, but they are uncommon, likely because they are not as lucrative for lawyers.
Yikes, I was afraid there was a new tweet, but this is still the infamous 2018 one.<p>Still, I'm a bit confused -- as much as I think he deserved to be fined/punished for it, the $20 million SEC fine did that.<p>It seems like he should be subject to an SEC fine <i>or</i> a shareholder lawsuit, but not both -- isn't it redundant? I would assume that the SEC fine was calculated as an "appropriate" punitive amount -- not a punitive amount minus what they expected a shareholder lawsuit would also result in?
What Musk did was certainly unethical, but it highlights how dumb the stock market really is. At what point is the investor expected to take responsibility for bad investments based on speculation?
It's very difficult to argue that this wasn't a gross failure in Musks' fiduciary repsonsibilities. Although he's bought his way out of other egregious fuck ups in the past.
"U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled on Wednesday that shareholders could try to prove Musk intended to defraud them with his Aug. 7, 2018 tweet and follow-up messages about plans for his Palo Alto, California-based company."<p>Placing my bet that he did not >intend< to defraud them. Going to cost them a pretty penny to try to prove something that didn't happen.
$420?<p>He was making a joke and some money-havers were to dumb to spot it. Suing Musk over a tweet is like me suing Forbes about their forecasts, and I'm a nobody.
And that's how you know the situation is improving in the world. The shorts are back to manipulating TSLA through their lapdog - mainstream press. The lawsuit is a nothingburger that will go nowhere. It's kind of difficult to prove shareholder injury if the stock doubled since then.
The situation with Elon is kinda complicated. I almost never side with his haters (short-sellers, Brooklyn socialists etc) but there’s no doubt he does some objectionable things from time to time.<p>Long before the more recent controversies I remember probably the first thing that turned me off a bit was when someone wrote a critical piece about a launch event and Tesla cancelled his car purchase.. (Incidentally I looked up that incident and saw PG kinda didn’t like it either <a href="https://twitter.com/paulg/status/694892884508553216?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/paulg/status/694892884508553216?s=21</a> )
Good luck to the "shareholders" (I assume they are not long) trying to prove Elon was defrauding them. All shareholders now have a hugely better value than before he tweeted that.