- Elon Musk accused of illegally selling $7.5 billion in Tesla stock in Q4 2022.
- Lawsuit alleges Musk and board violated fiduciary duties by selling shares ahead of disappointing vehicle sales data.
- Shareholder seeks disgorgement of $3 billion in illegal gains and damages from directors for reckless behavior.
That title is a very long way of saying that he’s been accused of inside trade
Can we revoke his government contracts now?
Can we deport him now?
Dude, you can’t talk about deporting people back to Africa. Not cool.
If he’s from Africa, why is he white?
/ref
Would be nice to have SpaceX be independent of him.
No, that’s counterproductive because the government uses those services. Instead, the government could confiscate his stock in those companies.
SpaceX would probably be more profitable if they didn’t have to spend so much time and resources on preventing Musk from interfering with things.
I think you’re really undervaluing his contributions. Think of it from an employee of space X’s shoes
Having the big boss show up one day and yell “I want to launch my car out of orbit, start building a prototype right now, and everyone is doing overtime until it’s done! I’ll be sleeping in my office and walking around looking for excuses to fire people” is irreplaceable.
Do you think engineers build things just because that’s what they do? Obviously you need to have someone rich yelling at them and threatening to fire people
It’s mostly Tesla and Twitter that he’s wrecking, but yeah Shotwell does sometimes rescue SpaceX from terrible ideas he has, like canceling Falcon Heavy.
Twitter was wrecked with the purchase, it’s been on borrowed time since. The business is now worth less than the $13bn loan it took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf. It was a leveraged buyout, just like every business that goes under after “being saddled with debt”.
Man someone’s job is literally just poring over thousands of pictures of Musk to find the worst ones
While “find the worst photo of them for the article” is definitely a thing that happens, are you sure it’s happening here? He just looks like a normal person in a normal pose. It’s what people look like without makeup and studio lighting.
Probably the opposite. There’s probably someone whose job it is to find and/or take flattering pictures of that asshole
What a joyous year if we could get Trump and Elon in jail this year… They could be roomies!
Please no, we don’t need them plotting together in jail
Would be a pretty funny “prison break esque” movie though.
The key to escape is Donald’s tiny hands can reach things other prisoners hands are to big for.
And Elmo creates the perfect diversion by convincing every other prisoner to invest in prison coins, only to pump and dump em causing a riot.
Neither of them are going to prison. Trump’s judge explicitly said as much during his 10th contempt citation, and Musk has been pissing on the leg of the SEC for the last five years straight with no consequences.
So you’re saying they’re never getting their comeuppance?
Not under a Biden government, no
… WHAT’S New in Capitalism…
🫠
Couldn’t you have posted a non-paywalled article so we don’t have to discuss a headline?
CEOs have to announce they will sell in advance. But, I can’t see if he did this because of what you posted.
Apologies, I run the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Firefox so I don’t even notice when sites have paywalls (and I recommend everyone else do the same). It’s right up there with adblockers as being almost an essential component of browsing the web these days.
https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
Here are a few more options for viewing the article without a paywall if you don’t want to install an extension.
Is going to archive.is and copy/pasting the url too hard?
I don’t know, maybe ask the OP?
Wouldn’t that volume for sale appearing on the market decrease the price in and of itself?
Insider trading seems to have been perfectly legal for the last few decades. Nothing will come of this or it would start setting precedent that we could use against our government leaders and other billionaires and federal judges. Not gonna happen.
Oh NOOOOO! So you might point at this genius brain to tell us, he’s just another fraudster? NOOOOoooooo! Who whould have thought? /s
Punish him daddy
… and nothing will happen.
Didn’t Martha Stewart go to prison for this exact thing?
No. She went to jail for lying to the feds.
Her financial manager was suspected of insider trading. The FBI questioned her about it and she lied to them in an attempt to protect him.
Did her financial manager insider trade?
Probably. She was not found guilty of lying about her reason for selling the stock in question, though she was found guilty of obstruction and other lies, along with conspiracy.
She was never charged with insider trading, so if she hadn’t lied, she would likely have been fine.
Interestingly, they also charged her with securities fraud. They argued that, as the face of a publicly traded company, covering up a crime was market manipulation even if it had nothing to do with that company. The judge dismissed that charge.
Isn’t that the definition of insider trading? Lock him up like Martha, she did way less and served time in a prison resort.
Felon Musk
“Felonious Musk” might be a good nickname.
That’s only the 5th time he commits fraud. He has been at court several times because of his actions. It seems no one really wants to arrest him
He should run for president. He can claim the long form version of his birth certificate says he was born in Hawaii.
I need to look up how “insider trading” even works.
When you are the CEO, and you make decisions, and you own your own stock - wouldn’t everything you ever do be with insider info? It is just honor system pinky-promise to act in good faith? I mean that sounds super effective.
At my workplace we are only allowed to sell stocks within certain windows, usually it’s a brief period immediately after we publicly release earnings. I think for higher ups it’s even more restrictive.
I’ve known people at IC level sell outside of windows and barely get a mention. Some people have odd vesting schedules for things like RSU’s, so sometimes it’s unavoidable.
At higher levels, it’s locked down considerably. My old director said that he had to have a meeting to go through a sale of his stock, so that it could be approved to be out of a window of potential releases in the company outside of his own division. I imagine that at VP+ level you need accountants just to handle what is a few clicks for an average corp worker.
We had a 2 week window 2 or 3 days after earnings were released.
Edit: You could preschedule sales though like recurring once a month, but it wouldn’t take effect immediately. I can’t remember what the delay on that was, but it might have been starting after the next earnings?
Normally you publicly say looong in advance, like at least half a year in advance, that you plan to sell this amount of shares at this point in time. No more, no less, not earlier, not later, no backsies.
Well no, there is backsies. You can rescind your intent to sell within a couple days. What most CEOs do is set up regular sells every month way in advance, then choose not to sell unless its opportune at the last minute. If that sounds like it completely defeats the purpose of the rule in the first place, yep! The system is rigged.
Wouldn’t say completely. The notice of intent to sell is not there to prevent CEOs from selling when they want to, it’s to notify you that they could sell this much if they wanted to.
The purpose is just to say that you need to be prepared for a potential sale. If the CEO keeps backing out of a sale, that does hurt your ability to predict when they will but not how much they could sell and therefore how much those sales could potentially affect your investment.
All of that is strategic because otherwise investors could conceivably do the opposite and sell before the CEO is forced to sell and then buy his shares at a lower price. That would mean the stock would tank every time the CEO went to sell. The problem exists because most of the solutions are even worse
That’s a fair point, thank you! I was mostly commenting because that rule gets brought up every time someone talks about insider trading (and musk specifically) as a defense and it’s deeply irritating. It makes sense the rule is more about not hobbling CEO investment than insider trading since it really doesn’t do much to prevent the latter.
The problem exists because most of the solutions are even worse
Everything you said makes a lot of sense, but this drives it home… The stock market is so unbelievably ridiculous. It’s just unmanageable, it’s such a simple idea with such horrible effects it might be a great filter
Yes but you see, he is a billionaire… Insider trading and other laws are for the pauper rich
I love how resort is tacked on there at the very end. Like you read it in a quiter voice.
Well, she did spend time in Club Fed
Forgot the final bullet points
- US Government does jack shit in terms of legal ramifications for breaking law.
- Musk pledges to break US law once again.
