Why the SEC is going after Elon Musk and why he’s losing his most ardent fans (opens in new tab)

This isn’t about whether the SEC likes or dislikes Musk. This is about the ability of public company investors to rely on a modicum of good faith that the official statements of public company CEOs aren’t pure BS or stock manipulation. In this case an inference of intentional stock manipulation to hurt “shorts” has a fair bit of merit.

If investors need to wonder if a CEO can say anything without any ramifications then public markets break down. The cost of capital goes up for the entire investment universe. This is serious stuff.

Tesla investors need to realize there is a broader world beyond their one obsession.

I don't like the implications that his tweets are what cause all of the stock's price movements. Sometimes they obviously have an impact, with his infamous $420 privatization tweet being the best example, but as for the last few days of the market, stocks were down significantly across the entire market, and TSLA has always been very volatile. Tweets can have an effect but it's not fair to simply look at a tweet, then notice that the stock is down 5% today, then assume that is causation instead of correlation. I'm not denying his tweeting may be very influential, but there's much more to the market price than just that.

This reads like the ramblings of an Musk fanboy who can't accept that his hero has an ego the size of Texas.

> When Elon was criticized by Vernon Unsworth, my speculation is that some of Elon’s circle sent him some info that linked Vernon to the child sex industry. One speculation could have been that there was a photo of Vernon with some young Thai girls on a bed.

Completely baseless speculation.

> In other words, if Vernon wasn’t a pedophile then that would come out

You can't prove a negative.

> What Elon should have done was if he had evidence that Vernon was a pedophile, then he should have shared that evidence with the public. He could have “leaked” the evidence to the media. Or Elon could have hired a private investigator to gather the evidence.

Yes, he should have. If there was evidence he should have handed over to the authorities and I'm sure one of his many lawyers told him the same thing. So either there is no solid evidence or he thinks playing To Catch a Predator on Twitter is a better idea than going to the police.

> Thus, opposing Elon has now become a moral issue… something a growing number of people feel like they need to do to protect justice and reign in an abusive billionaire. This is very sad, because it’s not Elon’s intention to be unjust or to spread baseless accusations.

You have no clue what his intentions are. It's totally possible you are correct, but it's also totally possible that he's got a giant ego and got in a pissing contest and went a little to far with his insults, or one of a million other possibilities. This whole article is just wild baseless speculation.

> In other words, the SEC case isn’t necessarily just about the “funding secured” tweet by Elon.

I'm pretty sure it's mainly about the fact that he tweeted something that was clearly not true to the world (Funding was not actually secured) to drive his stock price up and screw over short sellers.

> They’re going after Elon because of “funding secured” because they think they have legal grounds to make a strong case.

Yes, they have strong legal grounds to go after him because he broke the law.

> The SEC is just trying to solve a problem, and they’re doing it the best way they know how, even if it’s overboard.

Nothing the SEC did was overboard. Pretty much every single publication I read was amazed by how light the SEC's initial offer was and even the offer he finally ended up taking could have been so much worse. Elon being barred from being the CEO of any publicly traded company was a very real possibility.

Look, maybe you're right. Maybe the media, the market, the SEC, and some high level government officials are all out to get Elon because they don't like how eccentric and awesome he is while he changes the world or maybe he keep getting in trouble and is losing popularity because he keeps breaking the law.

Personally, I choose to believe that he's a very smart dude who recently went from being a scientist and CEO to being a celebrity and it's gone to his head. Now that he's on top of the world and has millions of fans, he's handling it in the same way teen pop stars do.

As he makes more and more enemies and then claims the world is out to get him, I can't help but think about the following quote.

"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."

I think Musk knows what he is doing. He is obsessed with the short sellers and is most likely playing them through this. Yes the SEC took a whack at him. Probably all part of the plan.

I like Elon more today than a month ago when I didn't know much about him, so he is still gaining fans. A bit like Alex jones is still gaining fans after being demonized by social media.