Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

Re:Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging ... by ballenf on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @09:54AM (#17346601)

Serious question: would the penalty for sabotage be greater if it came with a short-sale payoff? Is sabotage somehow considered insider trading? I can see some kind of vague fraud charge, but is there a specific law that punishes sabotage more harshly if one financially benefits from it?

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Re:Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging ... by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @12:22PM (#17348046)

> I can see some kind of vague fraud charge, but is there a specific law that punishes sabotage more harshly if one financially benefits from it?

Not sure. My point is one's odds of being caught go way up if the sabotage is twinned with securities transactions.

Nobody scans for sabotage. Many agencies scan for insider trading. After a corporate event, e.g. an earnings revision or surprise, thousands of automated systems look for trades that were unusually (a) profitable and/or (b) large.

To make sabotage worth it, one would need to enter into trades that are (a) small and unusually profitable or (b) large and usually profitable. Those trades will get flagged by systems designed to catch insider trading. That, in turn, will result in a human trained to spot unusually-clairvoyant trades reviewing the case.

There are many reasonable motivations for sabotage. But for all of them, the gains must outweigh the operation's cost and risk. Short-selling gains don't make the balance.

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