[freebeard]

People are pulling out of the market because Elon lies to manipulate shareholders and cost them billions and that has become even more obvious.

I don't have any reason to support Musk, but when flaming him let's at least get it right.

What he's being investigated for is not alleged lying to cost stockholders billions.

What he's being investigated for is alleged lying to cost stock traders - possibly stock manipulators, billions. Stock traders and hypothetical manipulators who DIDN'T own any stock, BORROWED and SOLD a bunch in the expectation that it would drop, some of whom apparently hired, through cutouts, a bunch of trolls to talk the stock down.

So when he said (unfortunately for him, without cutouts) that they might be going private and the stock shot up, the people who sold the borrowed stock were stuck having to buy some back at a HIGHER price than they sold it for (which is what you risk if you sell a stock short), but the people who actually owned it were just fine.

So the shorts closed out some short positions and took a big loss. Then, since Musk said that in a way that COULD be traced to him, they were able to sue him for the losses and complain to the SEC, getting it to start an investigation. THEN the stock DID start to tank, and the people who owned it DID take a loss.

https://slashdot.org/story/18/09/07/...ring-interview

Weed mixed with tobacco, and whiskey. None of it illegal in California.

It's now obvious that everything Elon tweeted that manipulated the market was a lie.

Meanwhile, in the universe that we live in, there were multiple entities competing to buy Tesla [nytimes.com]. Including, among others, multiple sovereign wealth funds (not just the Saudis), and Volkswagen. The terms however were more painful to Tesla than staying public, including various combinations of loss of control, requirements to build large local production facilities and so forth. It also became clear that the best their advisers could do for allowing retail investors to remain in (which was part of the plan, to minimize the size of the buyout) was an exotic trust structure that would have had a low chance of being approved by regulators.

But naaaaaah - who cares about actual investigative reporting when you can base articles on "Megatrex from the comment section of Ars Technica"? FUD away everyone! It's a lot more fun!

[ibid]