That's where the market manipulation comes into play. Acknowledging/threatening a possible pump and dump if he doesn't get his way could clear the SEC's bar of "Intentional or willful conduct designed to deceive or defraud investors by controlling or artificially affecting the price of securities, or ... designed to drive a stock’s price up or down"

Someone much smarter than I could likely argue that the "threat" of Elon possibly pulling out his investment in a company is affecting the stock price, and now suddenly Elon is in control of the direction of the stock, even though the underlying fundamentals have not been changed.

https://www.sec.gov/files/Market%20Manipulations%20and%20Cas...

AFAICT, there's no deception or fraud in his behaviour; nor is there anything artificial - he's put real money down, and is offering real money. It's not like he's made a one-off tweet about it.

Not to get pedantic, but if you read their definition of market manipulation, there's another point that's unrelated to the deception/fraud clause (though those are loaded terms legally, and one again likely could argue they are)

"Intentional interference with the free forces of supply and demand"

He put money down (a lot of money down!), but that doesn't give him the right to manipulate the stock price purely based on the fact he has a stake on it or not; in fact it gives him a duty not to do so, because he now has a motive/vested interest in profiting off of it. There's rules to follow and forms to file to protect against that, and he's already has one lawsuit against him in that vein: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/twitter-lawsuit-...

It sounds to me that you're interpreting that in such a broad way that you could argue that any stock purchases he makes would be in violation of this.

If the market decides the stock should go up or down after someone invests/divests (or files the applicable, standard form), that's one thing.

If he's prematurely saying what direction he's going to go one way or another, that's another thing. You don't see Vanguard tweeting "we're going to invest in this company if X happens and divest if not" to the general public, especially if they're trying to influence X to happen.

This essentially why he got in trouble with Tesla for tweeting he wanted to take it private at $420/share, immediately making the stock price jump up, even though he did not have "funding secured" and did not take it private. And he almost lost the ability to be a CEO or on a board of a public company for 10 years because of that!

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226

> If he's prematurely saying what direction he's going to go one way or another, that's another thing. You don't see Vanguard tweeting "we're going to invest in this company if X happens and divest if not" to the general public, especially if they're trying to influence X to happen.

Because Vanguard is a passive fund. Activist funds do this all the time.

And Elon initially filed as a passive investor.

Him putting money down literally is a free market demand for that security, and his ability to freely publicly offer lots of money literally is the "free forces of supply and demand" that's not supposed to be interfered with.

This clause is explicitly not intended to do what you imply, it does not restrict this particular action by Musk at all.