> I left the July 31st meeting with no question that a deal with the Saudi sovereign fund could be closed, and that it was just a matter of getting the process moving. This is why I referred to “funding secured” in the August 7th announcement.

Elon is a smart man. He knows this does not mean that funding has been secured. "Could be" is not a "secure" state.

Intent does not matter. If Musk got up on Twitter and announced "I have secured orders for fifty million cars at $50000 each" because he was drunk at 8am, that would not be excusable either.

Intent matters when determining if someone is lying or not. It doesn't matter when determining if someone committed an act. So in this case he seemingly committed the act of making an untrue statement. But whether he was lying while doing so is not so clear because we don't know if he was being intentionally misleading.

Intent matters enormously in US criminal law.

Intent matters enormously but I think this is a different situation than some layman commenting on financial matters. Musk is the CEO of a ~50B public company with deep experience in fundraising and other matters of finance.

Even if we can't say definitively what was going on inside his head when he posted that tweet we can say that any reasonable person in that role with that level of experience can be expected to understand what "funding secured" means.

It's kind of like if I walk into a store and take something off a shelf without paying for it. I can't claim "it's not stealing because I didn't know this stuff wasn't just free for the taking" because any reasonable person in my situation should understand what a store is and how it works.