On the other hand, it feels... strange somehow that a joke (if a slightly deadpan one) has consequences this severe. It affected the markets and it obviously wasn't without real-world consequences in any case, but something about this all just feels a little off somehow.
If it was legal to do stuff like this there would be a lot more stock manipulation than there is now, which would make the market worse for investors.
The point of these regulations is that investors should have confidence that the price of a stock is based on the market's estimation of its value, that relevant information has been disclosed to the SEC, and so on. If people could not assume those things, investor confidence would decrease, and that would hurt the entire market.
I also don't agree that Musk saw his tweets about Tesla going private as a joke. He made enough tweets that it affected the stock price. A CEO of a publicly traded company ought to know better.
Does a gaggle of teenagers running into a movie theater and yelling "fire!" constitute a joke? People might get seriously injured in the ensuing chaos.
The same is (almost) true here, people lost money because of a tweet that was Musk was prohibited from making by law. There need to be consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
> The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's criminal conviction was constitutional
> the First Amendment did not protect speech encouraging men to resist induction
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
> The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
I can imagine this striking him as "haha, wouldn't it be funny if..." and tweeting it out without thinking. I don't think that makes it okay, but it's easy to imagine it not being motivated by the same psychopathic intention as yelling "fire!" in a theatre.
I'm not defending his behaviour; I guess part of my unease here comes from how a lot of people treat twitter as an externalized stream of consciousness, and how that has a strange interaction, especially with things like SEC rules.
EDIT: down $31 in after hours, hell, I’m thinking about suing. :-P
Fortunately, my brother talked me out of it but I was seriously considering buying some.
Which is exactly it. Folks here and elsewhere refer to it as "...obviously a joke". No, it's not so obvious, because if you joke about such things the SEC will nail your ass to the wall. And hence my consideration of purchase. Were the SEC not to follow through, well, what are they going to say when the next joker says, "j/k"?
And so, apologists and Musk themselves are about to find out that they're fucking serious when they tell you not to make bomb jokes in the airport security line. And when your antics take 10% off your share price in one day, Musk'll start to lose some fans even, because this shareholder sure isn't the Musk fan he once was.
This case is unique in that both shorts and longs were harmed. Plenty to go around. How many people bought shares at ~$350 assuming they'd be private at $420 because the CEO said so?
The risk is if Elon musk could be a misleading liar, and the return was 20%. Well the end result is that Elon musk is a manchild who deserves books thrown at him by SEC and DOJ.