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Comment by katabatic | Hacker News Reader

This is true for every employee of every public company on the planet. We're discussing it here because Mr. Musk thinks the rules don't apply to him.

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Public? Every company in existence makes you sign a contract that you won't disclose sensitive company information, public or not.

Sorry that's simply false. You have all your freedoms. You can get fired for exercising them but that doesn't mean you don't have them. If the shareholders wanted to fire Elon Musk they would, but they aren't so the SEC should butt out of the issue.

You can’t lie about your company as a ceo. That’s securities fraud.

Elon effectively has controlling interest due to his supervotes. Sure, 89.5% of the outside votes can out vote him, but that’s an absurdly high bar. [0]

Also, the SEC is a regulator for a reason. Saying the company is cool with it (even when it’s really unclear if that’s actually true give the voting setup) is completely irrelevant to if the behavior is acceptable to society. After all, grifters are totally fine with gritting when they’re the ones doing it, but that doesn’t mean grifting a societal benefit.

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/how-elon-musk-con...

_Every_ CEO of _every_ publicly traded company has _every_ company-related tweet vetted by a company lawyer. What the SEC is asking of Musk here is simply that he follow the industry-standard.

Let's not forget Musk owes a fiduciary duty to Tesla shareholders and his tweets have repeatedly lost shareholders money and induced people to purchase shares on false/misleading information. That's securities fraud.

Source: Corporate & Securities Attorney. I was once the approver of many such tweets. Though thankfully the people I worked with were exceedingly reasonable in comparison to Musk.

Edit: Missed a word.

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