I'm sorry, but in what world does having a plan constitute insider information?

> 'Knowing' you will put an offer to buy a company is insider information

No it's not.

Step 1: You plan to put an offer in on a company, which you know will drive up the share price

Step 2: You buy shares in the company

Step 3: You publicly disclose you will buy the company, driving it's share price up

Step 4: You sell those existing shares now that the price has gone up.

That is trading on insider information.

Insider information isn’t information that only exists in your mind.

If you have no intention to actually follow through and it's a false promise, that's a pump-and-dump. It's securities fraud, but it's not insider trading.

If you have an intention to actually buy and make a good faith effort and fail, that's just business.

Market manipulation is what I meant instead of insider trading. My point was: illegal.

Depends on intentions. The fact that he hired Morgan Stanley to facilitate the privatization process indicates genuine intent.

Ehhh any large play could be considered market manipulation. JetBlue recently offered to buy Spirit, but there’s no 2000+ comment thread on that.

I can assure you that the CEO and the board has much more insider information than Elon.

Duh, but they are not acting on the insider information.

Elon is. He bought shares, then put in an offer which drives his existing shares up. Perhaps you can argue until he sells them he isn't acting.. perhaps.. but if he sells them today, are you still telling me he isn't acting on insider information?

From the SEC website: Who is an insider? An “insider” is an officer, director, 10% stockholder and anyone who possesses inside information because of his or her relationship with the Company or with an officer, director or principal stockholder of the Company.

A principal shareholder is a person that directly or indirectly owns or controls more than 10% of any class of voting shares or securities of a company. The principal shareholder has the authority to vote using those voting shares.

Elon has less than 10% share (9.2%), so he's not an insider. Probably he stayed under 10% because of this law.