1) The court would issue a judgement for Twitter, against Musk, for $44b.
2) Musk would either voluntarily pay it by selling his own assets, or he would refuse. If he refuses, then:
3) Twitter would go about seizing and selling Musk's assets, until they have raised funds to cover the $44b judgement.
Twitter could levy whatever brokerage or account Musk uses to hold his shares. Somewhere there is an account which records the shares. Twitter would serve the entity managing the account with a levy, and order the shares be liquidated.
(1) Would it be legal for him to own the brokerage?
(2) What if he moves all of his stock in offshore accounts?
Shares don't need to be held in a brokerage. There's always a process to identify and seize the property in question.
2) There's no such thing. TSLA is a US public company, traded on US exchanges. It's simply not possible for shares of the company to exist outside of US jurisdiction.
(1) Would it be legal for someone to own the legal entity owning their shares of publicly traded companies?
(2) What if he moves all of his stock in offshore accounts?
The legal entity which maintains the list of teslas owners is ultimately tesla, but that duty will be likely given to dtcc.
A stock is ultimately just an entry on a list maintained by the company, most offload the managing of the list to DTCC and usually the pointer isn’t to you but to your broker dealer.
There is no sense of being able to hide ownership overseas, we’re talking about an American company keeping a list that points to someone, that list can’t be offshored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_&_Clearing_...
He may just own the shares directly with the company (we’ve largely done away with paper share certificates). Or he may have transferred them to his broker (Morgan Stanley?) (who in turn might custody them with a custodian BNY Mellon?) who holds them on his behalf. If he then transferred those shares to say DBS in Singapore MS/BNY is going to inform computershare “fyi we just sent all those Elon musk shares to DBS in Singapore” and DBS is going to say (FYI we know have custody of all those Elon musk shares)..,and when you go looking for those shares all you have to do is go to computershare with a court order and say where are Elon’s shares, and they’ll be like, oh over at DBS in Singapore… and for all I know the registrar can probably just send a note to DBS in Singapore and be like (ahh we got a court order to transfer these shares to some other guys so we did, subtract $44b from his account)
All of this is a long winded way of saying that “shares” are just entries on a ledger maintained by the company or someone else on their behalf, which makes seizing them, typically pretty easy…
