I would've made the same comments if he were not making them. If it's green, sure you can be skeptical, but that does not prevent people from reading the comment for its merit. If someone wants to call someone a short just for being pessimistic about Musk's behavior then just add that to the pile.
Musk blames all his problems on shorts. Tesla's failures are not his responsibility. He's only responsible for its successes, including those of interns who make the media. Musk is the only one who can get things done quickly at Tesla because only what he says goes, and even his word does not mean much lately. Had a settlement with the SEC, backed out. Settled again with a worse deal a day later, and soon after violates the agreement and states on TV he never had any intention of following it.
Musk himself has $55.8B in compensation tied to market cap at stake, which gives him equally self-interested reasons to balance things out. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/tesla-shareholders-approve-e...
But they certainly can engineer a fake rumor of an SEC requesting contempt of court by manipulating journalists and forging documents, if sufficiently motivated. Consider the SuperMicro story submitted to mainstream publications last year that was obviously fake and caused a massive decline in their stock. I don't think it's above a sophisticated actor to socially engineer a journalist in service of a "short and distort" campaign. Even Jim Cramer laid out the typical tactics of a short attack: get a short position open and then spread false rumors to a "bozo reporter" [0][1]
I'm no big Elon Musk fan, but the funny thing is -- correct me if I'm missing something -- I can't seem to find any evidence that the SEC ever published the complaint[2] documents supplied by a USA today journalist on the sec.gov website. Searching for "Case 1:18-cv-08865-AJN" only brings up the original settlement from October 2018. That alone gives me pause.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6gxPCurDJs&t=1m43s
[1]: https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/2918951-g-hudson/1026551-...
[2]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5750664-Show-Cause.h...
This is waayayayayayaaaayyyyy off the deep end. Please check your priors, they are busted.
Furthermore, why haven't we heard anything from the SEC? They are an increasingly transparent organization. Why haven't they issued a press release or published their court filings on their website? Are we supposed to just trust a journalist's word and ability to verify that an anonymous "source familiar with the matter" isn't just bamboozling them?
of course it's common.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776?lang...
There's one excellent example of illegal market manipulation.
Something of the scope you're suggesting has literally never happened, as far as I am aware. Certainly not recently (i.e. last forty years) in the US. Bet ya fifty dollars the SEC did in fact send this show-cause order.
Sorry, but this story originally came from Bloomberg and I lost all faith in Bloomberg after they refused to retract the SuperMicro story. I will believe it when I see it on the sec.gov website. Until then it's as good as bullshit in my eyes.
He and his legal team will absolutely receive copies of any court filings in this case.
Individual filings won't be on sec.gov. You can check PACER, though.
This filing also indicates Musk's legal team chimed in about the tweet in response to the SEC's inquiry (page five). If that weren't the case, Musk would certainly contest that statement. This bit too:
> "According to counsel, immediately upon seeing Musk's 7:15 tweet for the first time after Musk had published it, Tesla's "Designated Securites Counsel" arranged to meet with Musk, and they drafted Musk's corrective 11:41 tweet together."
For an application to a court seeking that someone be held in contempt of court? Yes, this absolutely would be on sec.gov as a 'litigation release' and there are 2500 such examples listed there. If it were true and the SEC is just waiting to issue a press release, I think it's prudent to actually wait for that rather than believe some apocryphal document.
As for contesting the statement, who knows? He is not exactly the most stable individual these days (which is what makes him and his companies a natural target for shortsellers)
The only difference between Tesla and any other company is that Tesla has a lot more reasons why people want to be short.
He's done all of this to himself, and he can't seem to stop.