This comment will never get the adoration it deserves.
Alternative analysis:
Since that tweet Tesla’s stock has been down 29%. The result of which is that millions of people, many of whom are uninformed investors or have some kind of retirement/pension fund associate with the company, saw millions of dollars wiped out because someone needed attention. The SEC is seeking to prevent further injury to the public by barring this manic and volitle fool from officership.
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Well, yes. That’s what the relevant law is supposed to protect people from. Your point was?
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Except the other half of the SEC’s argument is that if he didn’t do it on purpose he’s an idiot who can’t be trusted to not do it again.
From the lawsuit:
Musk knew or was reckless in not knowing that each of these statements was false
and/or misleading because he did not have an adequate basis in fact for his assertions.
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Someone had fun writing that article.
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“I really don’t think you know how this works.”
There is another way this works:
After being insulted by Elon Musk, who walked off an advisory board for Trump, and made statements about why he did it, Trump appoints the new SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, who drops well-researched cases against Exxon and others. (Exxon gets former CEO Tillerson nominated as Sec of State) New SEC Chairman Jay Clayton then launches investigation of Tesla because of disgruntled stock manipulators.
Now he brings ridiculous suit demanding Musk lose ability to be CEO of public company for life. Please note that this is a penalty not demanded of billion-dollar hucksters convicted of deliberate fraud who bilked investors out of their money and put it into their own pockets.
Also note that the SEC went out of its way to make public the assertion that the possible stock price of $420 was due to marijuana culture. Ask yourself if you think the SEC was trying to be careful to not manipulate Tesla stock with that statement.
Tesla is going to fight this.
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My official advice on this: Buy TSLA. Nothing will come of this lawsuit, or at most it will be a slap-on-the-wrist fine. Elon turned down the opportunity to pay a fine because he’s an arrogant SOB and thinks he is smarter than the SEC (which is probably true), but in the end, they’ll haggle and the fine will be agreed to (but probably never paid). The stock price will go right back up to $360 by next year, and eventually $400-500 within 3 years. Tesla is on the same power curve as Apple when it launched the iphone-- look where their stock price is now.
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I’m not disagreeing with you. Markets tend to overreact to news like this. Tesla would perhaps be better off without Musk anyway. In any case, there is no reason to believe this news will have a lasting impact on Tesla’s business, one way or the other.
Added to my Watch List (which I’ll never get around to).
It’s not bad as such, but you can see the budget limitations.
This.
Elon’s “take-private” tweet was a blunder, and he should be penalized for it, but the idea that this was deliberate stock fraud is extremely dubious — and the penalties proposed are preposterous.
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I confess this statement confuses me. Is a publicly-traded company somehow NOT “public democratic ownership”?
And really, that’s entirely backward. Electric cars and space travel are too important to be left at the mercy of day-traders and stockbots who care about nothing but the quarterly bottom line, and subjected to the vagaries of short-sellers who’ve turned the public markets into a gambling hall where they can bet billions on a company’s failure (motivating them to try to cause that failure.)
A private company like SpaceX can build toward long time horizons and grand, ambitious goals without worrying about quarterly bottom lines, short-seller propaganda, or pearl-clutching moralists who freak out at a CEO dubiously sampling a spliff.
This is why Elon wanted to take the company private. He has repeatedly said he would have preferred to keep Tesla private, but he just didn’t have the capital for a venture of that size.
Being a publicly-held company has been a giant pain in the ass for Tesla. The shorts are still trying to kill it, and this SEC lawsuit is just another round in that cynical effort to profit from a deliberately-induced failure.
They’re trading your future for money to line their pockets.
(And if you mean something like “should be owned by the government for the benefit of the peepul”? Oh, hell no. We already have a government-owned space program, and it’s one of the worst of the Soviet-style command-economy pork-barrel bureaucracies in our government. The last thing we need is the Commisariat For Electrification of Transport with a Glorious Five-Year Plan.)
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“Uninformed investors”?
Yeah, uninformed investors sometimes lose money. Nature of the game. The SEC isn’t supposed to protect people from the consequences of their ignorance and poor decision-making.
As an informed investor, I haven’t lost a dime yet – and this morning’s pearl-clutching panic dropped the stock price low enough to trigger my standing “BUY” order, so now I have even more shares at a bargain price.
I predict that, less than a week from now, I’ll be able to sell those shares for at least a $30/share gain.
Don’t know if I will - I still expect much, much greater returns in the medium-to-long-term future (and I doubt this SEC suit will materially affect that), so I might hang on to them.
But your concern on behalf of possibly-uniformed investors is noted. 
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No, the stock is held in private hands, and the company works to enrich the owners, not necessarily the public. Your municipal Fire Department, for example, is almost certainly a truly publicly-owned institution.
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Yeah, then we would be just like China who leads the world in electric car production and renewable energy deployment. The horror!
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You are misinformed. That tweet caused a blip upwards, of a magnitude equal to the noise in the graph. Tesla, who is having the two best consecutive quarters of its life, and dominating the competition in the Model 3 marketplace, and ending what appears to be it’s final fiscal quarter in the red - likely forever - is down because of a concerted negative propaganda blitz in the media.
The Model 3 was the 5tth best selling sedan in the world last quarter, with the highest dollar sales volume in its segment. It has dominated BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Acura, Infiniti. So, 6 months of record sales, 6 billion dollars worth of income from the Model 3.
How many articles have you read about that, compared to negative articles about Musk? Yet, you call him a manic and volatile fool from whom the public needs protection. I wish we had a hundred more just like him.
Thank God for publicly owned fire departments!
Consider this clip (“There were 37 amateur fire brigades, and they all fought each other”) from the fictionalized-but-historically-accurate-enough film Gangs of New York:
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