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Comment by awrence | Hacker News Reader

If the SEC's new standard is to reprimand every CEO that makes a forecast the company ends up coming short on they're gonna get pretty busy pretty quick...

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It isn't. It is a settlement agreement that Musk personally and Tesla agreed to in order to avoid additional fines and penalties from his previous misconduct.

Yeah certainly seems as far as that whole thing is concerned no one cares to check / reinforce on the SEC side :) not that we can know for sure tbh. Bit of a super grey area all this imho. But like, if you're a potential TSLA investor and you can't be bothered to do two minutes of homework to figure out Musk's communcation "style", i don't know, like, should the SEC protect you? Maybe? Maybe not... And all things considered, there are plenty of CEO's doing worse by their shareholders than Elon so far...

So you're saying that Musk, Tesla's CEO, should be able to mislead investors unabated and that "buyer beware" is the solution rather than the SEC doing its job? I don't understand that argument.

Ultimately Tesla and Musk agreed with the SEC that his previous conduct was wrong, and that's how we got to this settlement agreement. So to argue now that the SEC is wrong and that Musk's behavior is fine because that's his "style" seems to fly in the face of Tesla's own viewpoint on historical events vis-a-vis misleading tweets.

Well a couple things. First as another commenter pointed out i believe correctly, this tweet was sent before that aggreement was finalized so your point is moot technically. But let's assume for the sake of market integrity CEOs shouldn't lie. (doesn't stop politicians from getting elected or prosecuted but i'll leave that aside :). This was not as you seem to claim a lie. This was a forecast which cannot be proven before hand to be false or not. The exact tweet was: TESLA made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019. Followed by a clarification that same day that he meant an annualized rate of around 500k. You can't factually prove this was wrong the day it was made. As it turns out it seems to me he got damn close and it was totally a legit forecast and not excessively bold but obviously you're welcome to have a different view.

There was a lot of drama when Musk made this tweet, and we don't know what sort of discussions or agreements have been made behind closed doors.

Musk hasn't made similar tweets since then, so it seems plausible that SEC did indeed give some sort of warning, or that the parties have had some sort of clarifying exchange regarding their agreement.

The SEC publicly sued over this tweet, and basically lost. All they got out of it was the new agreement that makes the previous agreement clearer. Not the sort of punishment they were asking for.

This is all a matter of public record, it was not handled behind closed doors.

Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of the lawsuit and its conclusion. That definitely settles the initial point.

There's a difference between "objective forecasting" and "hype". One should always be acceptable, the other should have some limitations or basis in reality.

>CEO that makes a forecast the company ends up coming short on they're gonna get pretty busy pretty quick...

Would you be shocked to learn that when a company realizes they are going to to materially miss a forecast they are obligated to notify shareholders? This is how it works.

You know, the exact opposite of Elon saying "profits from here on out" then losing $700MM the very next quarter.

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