Guidance for this year was 350k - 500k. Elon said several times on the call that he thought they could beat the 500k. This is a technicality on not getting approval for a tweet that could unreasonably be interpreted as saying they are definitely hitting 500k 8 months from now. This is stupid.
It's stupid to think that the difference between 350k and 500k is immaterial, especially for a company which struggled to hit the low end of that range the last 2 years.
Tweeting that they definitely would hit the high end of that range, i.e., 500k, i.e., almost 142% of the low-end of the range, was a specific statement about Tesla's capabilities intended to narrow the range of the earlier statements in the interview. Ergo, the tweet was material information and it was reasonable for investors to interpret that Tesla would hit 500k by the end of the year, because it was tweeted by the CEO himself. The clarification about it being a pro-rated (i.e., annualized) number was not provided until much later. (And legally that makes all the difference.)
That is the point. He only violated it if you take the obviously wrong interpretation that the 500k was a new material statement. It was not.
The agreement only covered new, material information, not repeating a previously given the high-end estimate.
Also, note that the market was closed at the time of the tweet and the second tweet clearing up any possible confusion, thus, having no impact on the stock.
No, he was required to get pre-approval even if he was repeating previously released information verbatim. They probably wouldn't have caught him if he was actually repeating it verbatim, but he still would have been breaking the requirement to get pre-approval.
> According to Tesla’s Policy, any edits to a pre-approved Written Communication or even releasing a verbatim pre-approved Written Communication more than two days after it has been pre-approved requires that the pre-approval be reconfirmed. Even if the exact substance of the 7:15 tweet had been pre-approved 20 days before, Musk cannot credibly claim that he thought he was not required to obtain pre-approval again under the plain terms of the Policy. In fact, the written communication in the 7:15 tweet was not pre-approved 20 days earlier or at any time. Musk’s claim that he thought he was simply restating information from the January 30 communications is not credible.
> Written Communications that contain, or reasonably could contain, information material to Tesla or its stockholders must, prior to posting or other publication, be submitted to Tesla’s General Counsel and Disclosure Counsel (or in the event of the General Counsel’s unavailability, Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer and Disclosure Counsel) for pre‐approval. Authorized Executives are not authorized to post or publish Written Communications that contain, or reasonably could contain, information material to Tesla or its stockholders without obtaining pre‐approval.
Whether it's new information or not, he was supposed to get approval first.
> Also, note that the market was closed at the time of the tweet and the second tweet clearing up any possible confusion, thus, having no impact on the stock.
Feel free to argue to a judge that the law knocks off overnight.
In any case: the judgement sought by the SEC is for civil contempt for breaking his agreement. It matters that he didn't follow the procedure that he had promised to follow.
as stupid as tweeting incorrectly and without legal review when tweeting correctly and with review is essentially your simple, easy to observe, 'terms of parole'?
Actual government legal agency going after someone on a stupid immaterial technicality about requiring approval for disclosing material information that might affect stock:
The tweet didn't have material information. The 500k number was public and discussed on a public investor call.
vs.
Crazy guy that bankrupted himself trying to build a rocket company and a car company simultaneously is less than overly cautious about his tweeting and how it could be used in bad faith by a government legal agency in the USA to persecute him.
Not misinformation, guidance was 350 - 500. This is a technicality of not getting approval for a tweet that could be interpreted as saying they are definitely hitting 500k 8 months from now. This is stupid.
If he didn't want to be bound by the requirement to have all his tweets go through a legal review, then he shouldn't have agreed to a settlement with the SEC that required him to do so. It's really that simple. Doesn't matter if it's stupid or not; he signed a legally-binding court document agreeing he'd do it.
> If he didn't want to be bound by the requirement to have all his tweets go through a legal review, then he shouldn't have agreed to a settlement with the SEC that required him to do so.
A lot of people don't realize this is industry-standard. Any reasonable CEO wants to make sure they aren't inadvertently committing securities fraud with the send of a tweet.
Tweets being reviewed by the legal department are par for the course at any publicly-traded company.
In the time between Elon's two tweets, enough trades could have occurred based on the misrepresentation that investors were financially harmed.
The point of the SEC is to prevent harms like that. The point of the SEC's 2018 settlement with Elon was to prevent him from investor-harming tweets like the one he made by requiring tweets about Tesla to be reviewed for accuracy and correctness before posting.
The hell are you talking about, none of the cliamed in any way that this was an academic research affiliated with any university, only one of them is affiliated with one. In their quillete article they even talk about how this is not an academic study, but rather a hoax like the Sokal hoax before it
Here's the situation as described in a good and fairly neutral (I think!) nymag article:
"Crucially, it does not matter that the hoaxsters didn’t attempt to publish their final results in a peer-reviewed journal. “Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research,” said Celia Fisher, director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education. All that matters is that Boghossian is an employee at PSU, and that he conducted what the university deemed to be human-subjects research based on a plain reading of how that term is normally defined for this purpose."
So it appears that Boghossian's academic affiliation is something he can't just leave at work; i.e. it seems that it was unsafe to go public with his involvement in the hoax. The Areo article makes it sound like the hoaxers thought they were doing the right thing by dropping their anonymity:
"This generated further attention that eventually got the Wall Street Journal involved, and far more importantly, it changed the ethics of utilizing deception within the project. With major journalistic outlets and (by then) two journals asking us to prove our authors’ identities, the ethics had shifted away from a defensible necessity of investigation and into outright lying. We did not feel right about this and decided the time had come to go public with the project. As a result, we came clean to the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of August and began preparing a summary as quickly as possible even though we still had several papers progressing encouragingly through the review process."
They thought this move would make it OK to complete their research project in good faith (without submitting any further hoax articles). But it wouldn't be the first time somebody thought they were off the hook, when in fact they were still exposed to accusations of ethical wrongdoing.
> Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research
This framing should tell you the bad faith in which the statement is being made. The authors didn't call it a research, critics rightly pointed out that it wasn't an academic research when they first revealed the hoax, and that nobody should take it seriously. Now that it is convenient to attack them by saying otherwise, now all of the sudden it is an academic research
The Areo article starts with "This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most thorough breakdown of the study".
Those words "the study" clearly seek to frame the hoax as part of a research project or "study".
I like the expert opinion quoted in the NY Magazine article that basically says, "yes, this disciplinary action is politically motivated, but it's also entirely legitimate".
It seems like that is often the way the world works—there are many more possible, legitimate, prosecutions than are actually pursued. The choice of which to pursue can be made in unfair ways. Often it is used to reinforce corrupt systems.
In this case, there isn't any visible corruption. Nobody entrapped Boghossian, nobody appears to have had it in for him in advance. He walked into this.
I find it interesting you can read this negative article about him and choose to believe the bad things, but dismiss the parts you think some might consider a positive
> Tripp was represented by Meissner Associates in the whistleblower matter earlier, but is now representing himself, attorney Stuart Meissner told CNBC.
> Tripp was represented by Meissner Associates in the whistleblower matter earlier, but is now representing himself, attorney Stuart Meissner told CNBC.
Not what I meant, I mean actually damaging something not just reputation or stock price. Even just deleting some critical file that had to be restored from a backup but just releasing information about the company doesn't fit my mental model of sabotage.
