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Comment by bsbechtel | Hacker News Reader

I'm not arguing Musk's tweet wasn't ill advised, but this seems to say a lot about how fragile our system is if 140 poorly thought out characters can cause so much damage. What about the fiduciary duty of all those investors who changed their positions based on this information? If you are putting millions of dollars at risk based on a cryptic tweet, you are failing at your job as much as Musk failed at his, and you don't deserve to be protected by the SEC.

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> If you are putting millions of dollars at risk based on a cryptic tweet, you are failing at your job as much as Musk failed at his

The SEC lets companies make corporate announcements on social media. If a company says "I was just acquired for $900 a share," I would consider that material information worth trading on. If a company says "funding secured," which has a very precise and technical meaning in corporate finance, in a corporate announcement, I would consider that to be similarly material.

Our capital markets won't work if straightforward misstatements in corporate announcements are permitted.

One of the SEC's core jobs is to protect investors from corporate officers who lie to them about the state of the public companies that they are running. This is precisely what Elon Musk did.

Were they around during Enron?

There was a huge investigation of Enron by the SEC. Among other things, CEO Jeffrey Skilling was barred from ever again serving as an officer of a public company.

He also spent ~12 years in prison (Though that was a separate action. The SEC can't send people to prison).

Nobody forced Tesla to file an SEC form 8K, officially designating his Twitter account as an official source of material information on Tesla for investors. But once that was done, yes, every character out of that account must be 100% truthful and complete. Because it has been affirmatively stated to be truthful material information.

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