SEC declares war on Elon Musk after another misleading tweet

arstechnica.com

12 points·e1ven··5 comments

I see where the SEC is coming from and I actually agree with them. That said I'm having a hard time getting behind the government's approach/response to Twitter/tweets when we have the POTUS tweeting the things he is. I don't want to get into politics here, that's not what HN is for really but it's a fact that Trump's tweets have not always been... shall we say? "Based in reality" or more succinctly "factual" ...

Now, I'm not saying the SEC should stop what it is doing, it just leave a really bad taste in my mouth.

Agreed. Musk's tweets may have negatively impacted Tesla's stock value, but POTUS has caused entire market exchanges to go negative with his tweets. My question is: does the SEC have jurisdiction and legal evidence to go after POTUS even if they wanted to?

I think it's a non-starter. Markets have always hung on the words of politicians and it would be terrible if a president had to police every word in relation to that. I think the burden of proof would be that one of his tangents was intended to swing the market in his favor, which would be hard to identify unless he had a huge presence in say, agriculture, before signing a massive subsidy to it.

does the SEC have jurisdiction and legal evidence to go after POTUS even if they wanted to?

No, because Trump isn't tweeting (or claiming to tweet) insider information about publicly traded companies, nor is he in a position to economically benefit from any of these trades (as per the few disclosures he has made, he does not own any publicly traded stocks).

I look forward to reading Matt Levine laughing through this (predictable) development.

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