Not quite. You can't intentionally say things for the purpose of manipulating the price, you can still say things if they affect the price -- it is impossible not to, since every little thing a CEO does affects the price to some extent (econophysics?).
The lawsuit would have to prove that Musk tweeted with the intention of manipulating the price. Seeing as Musk has always been wary of being public, it seems unlikely he engineered the tweet to do this. Occam's Razor would suggest that he's getting sick and tired of being public (ironically, for this exact reason) and tweeted that he would rather just take it private to avoid this sort of drama.
This is a clear statement of facts, something that would be entirely reasonable to trade based on. It also appears he knew this was a false statement, at best it was very reckless. I really don't see how you can defend this.
When your words make people gain or lose 9 or 10 digits of money in a matter of hours, they are taken very seriously.
Uhhh you mean like the endless rants about trying to get rid of short sellers? That isn't enough to establish a motive for you?
My personal opinion is Elon should find someone to run Tesla. He proved good electric cars can be built, but now we need someone to turn Tesla into Toyota to spread good electric cars to the masses. Given his behavior, missed manufacturing targets, etc I don't think he is the right person to do that. If the SEC wins, Elon being forced out may be a blessing in disguise.
He sent out a tweet that had a major effect on the shares of a major company, representing billions of dollars to be lost and gained by a lot of people. That's a serious offense and there are laws about that.
It's not about weed, it's about stock price manipulation at the highest levels.
If you want Tesla to live, you would cheer about his immature ass being kicked out to the curb.
He's the CEO. That doesn't just mean he gets paid a lot and can do whatever he wants. He also has responsibilities to his investors and potential investors such as accurately reporting on the financial situation of the company. If he doesn't want this responsibility and prefers the freedom to vent on Twitter he should step down. After all, one of the reasons CEOs are so well compensated is the additional responsibilities the job (supposedly) entails. You can't have it both ways.
Edit: It's not a witch hunt to hold someone accountable for their actions in a position of power. No one forced Elon Musk to tweet misleading information that could affect the stock price. Given how intelligent he is, he should know better.
They're maliciously envious - which is the product of an overly good self-image colliding with reality. They wish him harm because if he fails, he'll no longer remind them that that's how it looks like to actually achieve something.
The other would be competing car makers, who only now are starting to realize that electric cars are the future, except they're 5-10 years behind Tesla. I'm sure they'll catch up soon enough, given how they're much better at mass production than Tesla is atm, but they're way behind. Tesla will probably pivot to focus on their other endeavours - batteries (building the largest battery factory in the world), charging stations (building the largest charging station network in the world), green energy (solar panels and large scale battery storage), etc.
1) Short sellers. Short selling, as opposed to simply investing in a stock, is something that requires significant resources to begin with. Take these people with resources and acumen, and now given them a multi billion dollar incentive to see Tesla fail. You create a major motivator for people to not only speak negatively but to do all they can to try to foster and drive negative sentiment towards the company and Musk. This group of people are the main reason Musk has a problem with short sellers. Shorting is not bad, but the twisted incentive structure created by substantial shorting is. This group is made doubly effective by the fact that Tesla has chosen to keep with the strategy of a $0 marketing budget.
2) Useful idiots or trolls who simply enjoy attacking people without much of any consideration for facts or data. These individuals are already ubiquitous on the internet and unknowingly work as tools for #1.
3) People who genuinely feel Tesla is not headed in the right direction and would do better with different leadership.
---
In my opinion, the largest group by far is #2 followed by #1, distantly followed by #3. The problem is that #2 is a really really big group. They almost certainly already outnumber, by far, the entire population of people that go out of their way to speak positively of Tesla. So you end up with a perceived mass negative sentiment, even when in reality it's not really supported at all. E.g. - recently there was a motion to find a different CEO and it was voted down by an 83.5% margin. Another issue here is that Musk has decided to point out the awful behavior the media, which has also turned them against him. For instance on that vote I mentioned, reuters instead of reporting the result chose to run an article, "BlackRock voted to replace Tesla's Musk with independent chairman" with the numbers given, without percentages, in the article body. [1]
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-musk-blackrock/blac...