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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Never followed his story but the translated article on NyPost only mentions his cryptocurrency pump and dump scheme.

Which naturally leads me to the question, why was McAffee pursued for this all the way to Europe but Elon Musk isn't even investigated while millions watched him do the same?

I am not loading this politically at all. I am not from the US and I am mostly apathetic to celebrities. But I am genuinely curious why is it OK for one guy to do it and very illegal for another one doing the same?

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Because Elon Musk is significantly more sane and did not actually done very same thing. Having enough sanity to keep you schemes just on the safer side help. He is also not accused of rape and murder both of which make law enforcement look more closely on you in general.

Also, Musk is rich and powerful right now. That alone makes it harder to go after him as he will pay for better justice. McAffee is not that powerful.

Musk was fined 40 million for his stock tweets but I don't think he technically ever engaged in any crypto pump and dump because I don't think he ever actually held (or dumped) any crypto. I assume you have to actually financially benefit from such a scheme to commit some sort of crime. Otherwise you're basically just shitposting about crypto.

Did you miss the "Tesla buys billions of USD in bitcoin" headlines? Along with the "will accept payment in BTC" pump and "never mind, selling" dump?

did they actually dump their bitcoin? If yes I'd agree that it deserves attention but I don't think that's the case. Probably for that reason Elon actually posted in May or whatever that they have not sold their coins.

Unless you can show that he actually mislead users for financial gain I don't think you're going to get authorities involved.

I think he's pumping crypto in order to pump Telsa stock price. If Telsa falls out of the S&P500, it will probably descend into a death spiral.

Musk claims that Telsa never sold any of their bitcoins before the price collapsed when he reversed course on BTC, but who the hell really knows at this point?

Hmm I thought they had but apparently that was just the news being the news. (Although I'll note that Elon has lied on Twitter plenty of times before :) )

Either way, he has certainly gained financially from boosting Tesla's stock, which lying about crypto is part of...

Tesla sold bitcoin before their last quarterly report. They were about to underperform but thankfully their BTC announcement made sure they could dump and then beat earnings instead.

Weirdly, they announced they would no longer accept BTC (on grounds known for years) right after they dumped.

https://www.coindesk.com/tesla-sold-bitcoin-in-q1-for-procee...

This was very easy to find, and makes me question your position that you weren't aware of it.

that sale appears to have taken place before any of the communication, so that can't have been part of any pump&dump scheme either.

Well technically Musk said "Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin" when the policy change was announced. I haven't seen anything where he claims he didn't sell _before_ the change was announced.

I have no idea if he dumped his Bitcoin before announcing the change at Tesla, but misleading a bunch of people while leaving himself a technicality escape hatch would be extremely on brand for him.

Because (according to the allegations) McAfee didn't pay the tax man.

Neither do Musk, Bezos, Soros etc. They just manage to get away with it. I guess McAfee was just not rich enough and didn't have the right tax attorney.

There's a difference between legally paying no taxes despite being rich and illegally paying no taxes. The tax laws need to be reformed, but that's a separate issue.

In Spanish we use two terms, what McAfee presumably did was "evasión"(evasion) which is illegal while what Musk,Bezos, et al. do is "elusión" (avoidance) which is totally legal.

The trick is in knowing how to do Tax Avoidance.

Well, more accurately, the allegation is that he didn't even tell the tax man how much he owed: he never filed, despite being required to file.

The others all file, they just recognize very little income and make sure to recognize enough losses to cover it.

He also said he would eat is own anatomy regarding bitcoin price.. I guess this bet is gonna happen in another dimension.

Doctor, doctor, my anatomy hurts?

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