What about Musk making tweets about bitcoin whilst his company has a large investment. Isn't that market manipulation or maybe does not apply to rogue billionaires.
It may be a bit of a grey area ethically since he didn't disclose his ownership until later, but if he was doing it because he really believes in crypto and it's not just a cynical attempt to pump something he's holding and then close the position into the buying frenzy a day later, then I have no problem with it. Of course, though, it's not possible to read this intention from a distance.
One interpretation is that this is in the same ethical category as Instagram influencers who get paid to flash products in front of their users without disclosing that they're being paid.
Which is why it's not just ethically wrong but also illegal in many countries. Why the US allowing such behavior is beyond me.
Compare these two sequences of events:
1 - Initial purchase followed by disclosure followed by promotion
2 - Initial purchase followed by promotion followed by disclosure
In either case, Musk bought BTC at around 35k.
Do we have reason to think that the BTC price is higher now because Musk followed path (2) than (1)? It's not clear to me that that's the case here. And if it's not the case, then why on a first principles basis are we upset?
I agree though that "best practice" is to disclose upfront, if for little other reason than pump and dumpers (which Musk is not) have muddied the waters and this has become a generally good tradition to uphold as a result.
All company assets need to be auditable, ie an auditor can physically verify their presence. There is no way to do this with Bitcoin, which is a huge problem for public companies buying it.
Tesla simply needs to show the auditor their addresses and use the respective private keys to sign a message of the auditor's choosing.
The signed message proves they own those addresses, and the holdings can be easily verified on any block explorer or node.
This process can even be done remotely in a single afternoon, I don't know of any other asset class that is this easy to audit.
> contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
Maddeningly, people continue to think that it is somehow illegal insider trading? “You bought a thing without telling anyone, and then you told people that you liked the thing and it went up, that’s illegal.” I don’t even understand that intuition. No! You can trade when you know your own intentions, even when nobody else does! Also, man, it’s Bitcoin, there’s no such thing as insider trading.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-08/elon-m...