They could have probably made a 100k by disclosing this to Twitter. The reward/risk graph seems concave down and not convex up.

Twitter says for account takeover hacks, their bounty is set at $7k.

$7k vs $100k, you choose.

I'm trying to think of other ways to monetize this without ending in prison, and not really coming up with much...

Sure, you could short stocks and then make "Aaah, Tesla is going bankrupt!" tweets... But without an army of lawyers and accountants and money to pay them, it's hard to anonymously short stocks.

You could bribe people with publishing DM's - but again that's pretty high risk. And how do we know that hasn't already happened?

What else is there?

Maybe shorting wouldn't have been needed. Just buy from the dip and trust that the stock recovers when twitter confirms hacking. But requires a lot of cash that the attacker probably doesn't have.

Sell the exploit to someone with a bigger appetite for risk?

Way more effort and risk there, much more difficult without existing underground connections.

Why would you need to anonymously short the stock? It feels like it would be easy to get lost in the noise of regular shorts.

also any attempt at negotiation can be construed as extortion, and now they have all your info too.

They could have make >$10m With Elon’s account alone by manipulating the share price. A few 100k is nothing

it does not work that way. the trades will be cancelled, the account frozen before $ is ever able to leave,

Crypto can also become tainted and basically unsellable. It's especially easy to do with bitcoin or ethereum.

Also, unless they have the identity of the hackers, it wouldn't be that hard to make millions without sending any red flag. Tesla has an insanely high option volume, you could get into highly traded positions a few weeks/days before and cash out easily. Unless you really, really make dumb moves it's pretty safe. Much safer than cashing out on a BTC haul.

if the hacker lives in Eastern Europe opening a stock options account is not possible, unless he has connection with an American who can make the trades and cash out. no need to try to fool the SEC , which has billions of dollars of resources behind it. Also not all exchanges are regulated, and even regulated exchanges may not be able to trace the source. The money can be split and sent to many exchanges and mixing services over a long period. It is not safe. elon musk twitter being hacked would trigger extra scrutiny of all tesla stock option trades. The SEC has extremely advanced tools for detecting this stuff.

Anyone can trade US options from Eastern Europe, with a broker like Interactive Brokers

That's pennies compared to what a compromise like this would be worth...