Originally published at: Again, Elon Musk just sold a hefty chunk of Tesla shares (after saying he wouldn't) | Boing Boing
…
12 Likes
Looks like he has to, whether he wants to or not.
16 Likes
I’m ok with this!
6 Likes
Everything he’s done over the last couple of weeks stinks of desperation and duress.
23 Likes
I’m confused a bit about these latest sales. I thought insiders had to file well in advance of the sale, not after. Did that rule change, or is he flouting things again?
7 Likes
Rules are for the poors…
11 Likes
He’s cashing out and stashing funds away for the inevitable crash of all his holdings. I suspect the United States government will bail out and prop up SpaceX, but Tesla and Twitter are burning their way to the ground and he knows it.
9 Likes
He’ll owe some taxes on that, unless he finds a way to write off his bonfire.
7 Likes
Narrator:He will
8 Likes
I wonder how much more the company can take before the shareholders oust him as CEO. I suspect the only reason the board has kept him around this long is the Sunk Cost fallacy. Yes, they spent years propping up the popular image of “Elon Musk, Genius” to help generate interest in their cars but it’s time to rip off the Band-Aid.
17 Likes
I was surprised/not surprised that there is a Murdoch on the Tesla board. Son James.
11 Likes
Yeah, he currently only owns somewhere around 1/8 of the total stock at Tesla. A lot of shareholders are long-time members of the cult of Musk but institutional investors own nearly half of it. Might be hard to get enough people to agree to oust him but it’s certainly possible.
10 Likes
I think the actual rules are way more complex, and multiple things can make a sale “not illegal”, but the simplest to prove is “I filed a sale X months ahead of time”, or “I set up a rule based transaction X months ahead of time”.
Failure to do those things makes stuff messy, you would basically need to prove that while you were an insider you didn’t have any material non-public knowledge at the time of the transaction. This is easiest to prove just after a quarterly report is filed.
In some ways the “X months ahead” is pretty weak, because you can arrange a transaction six months in advance and know about projects a company is working on for years. You can even have a great idea that some important product of feature will launch in a specific time frame that is 6 or more months in the future and still file for a sale in six months, and then when the product rolls out and the transaction happens the “hey I set that sale/purchase up way back in January!” is basically always accepted.
Also while the X months in advance “rule” obviously covers stock sales (and purchases), it doesn’t cover merely holding onto stock. So if say you have material inside info that lasts years you can choose not to sell stock for years. Like say someone at Apple that knew about the iPhone four years before it launched (and to be fair I’m pretty sure everyone disclosed on Purple (the original iPhone code name)) were prohibited from selling stock (I know for sure the folks who knew in advance about the x86 Macs were). I’m sure there is an economic theory as to why that is good for the shareholders though, but I never took whatever ECON class covered that…
6 Likes
2 Likes
I’m not blaming boing^2 at all for reporting on him, as he’s currently quite relevant. I appreciate the coverage.
I just look forward to the day when he’s LESS relevant, and we no longer have to see his arrogant smirk on the daily.
16 Likes
James Murdoch is perhaps one of the least unpalatable Murdochs. He has been aligned with the environmental movement for some time and has expressed some dislike of the actions of News Group. Naturally, that means he is no longer his father’s favoured heir and successor.
7 Likes
He drove a Prius to work when he was at Nat Geo. Clearly bucking the family norm.
7 Likes
9 Likes
Just keep shoveling cash into that fire, Elon.
3 Likes
