Tesla is under a federal wire fraud probe for misleading investors | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is under a federal wire fraud probe for misleading investors

arstechnica.com

77 pointsvelmu44 comments

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And apparently stopping hiring: https://gizmodo.com/tesla-hiring-freeze-job-postings-elon-mu...

I'd be dumping TSLA so hard right now if I owned any, has to be the world's most overvalued stock right?

> "the world's most overvalued stock"

There's always Trump Media & Technology Group Corp, ticker DJT.

$6.5 billion market cap. Annual revenue $4 million (that's an "m").

It's a social media company that doesn't reveal any usage numbers or other KPIs. The company's auditor was just revealed by the SEC to be a complete scam with 100% fraudulent audits.

So why would anyone buy this? Well, it's 65% owned by a presidential candidate in the current election. The same candidate is threatened by massive legal fees.

So if you're Saudi Arabia, you can easily afford to spend a billion dollars on technically worthless DJT stock, and it goes straight to the pockets of the politician who has a very good chance of winning the 2024 presidential election. And there's nothing illegal about this, apparently. (For prior art, see that time when Qatar paid $1B for a distressed New York property owned by this same president's son-in-law.)

The best democracy money can buy. ;)

Personally I think that award belongs to the United Kingdom. They don’t even need a constitution.

To ensure the moneyed classes of Britain are well looked after, they have both a king who is a billionaire and a prime minister whose net worth is a more modest $500 million.

The King is irrelevant and the PM got his money by marrying an heiress. No, it's true that money is a problem, but those are the wrong places to look. Try https://www.transparency.org.uk/can-you-buy-lordship or https://news.sky.com/story/michelle-mone-who-is-she-and-what...

Wait, DJT un-crashed?

$2.5M revenue, $52M loss. What even is that?

[1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/trump-media-technology-group/...

A way for foreign nationals to donate billions to a US presidential campaign legally.

The thing stinks to be sure but you need more evidence to make that claim.

Presidential candidates are allowed to use unlimited personal funds in their campaign.

Trump owns billions of $DJT stock. His lockup period ends well before the election.

The share price can be manipulated at will given enough money, the Saudis have plenty of that, and there’s already a good track record of them using it this way; a $2B investment in Trump’s son-in-law “despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal”, as an example. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-in...

Donald Trump's hotels and other businesses accepted more than $7.8m (£6.1m) from foreign governments during his presidency. This is not news.

Why is the valuation so high then? Surely all the HFTs have enough money to short it and earn money off of it. I think a company with $0 valuation would be easier to transfer money. As only he could sell his share for >$0 for donation.

To short, you need to pay to borrow shares. And that’s not easy on a stock like DJT. It has a small float, and since professionals consider it overvalued, the premiums are unusually high. It also has an army of retail fans who can produce surprise spikes, meme stock style.

Hedge funds make their money with trades that are not obvious to everyone, because if they were, they’d be too crowded. “Short DJT” is definitely in that category.

> Surely all the HFTs have enough money to short it and earn money off of it.

They asked their shareholders to disable short loans (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/trump-med...).

Before that, everyone was already shorting to the point of 500% fees. https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240406227/why...

"Based on that data, to short 100 shares of Trump Media & Technology Group at the current price, it would cost between $24,895 and $29,874 a year. That means the stock would have to fall about 1.4% a day just to cover the cost of shorting it. And if the short were held for a year, the bet would still lose about $20,000 to $25,000, even if the stock price fell to $1."

There are perhaps other ways, too.

Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation? http://theintercept.com/2016/08/25/why-did-the-saudi-regime-...

Clinton's foundation got millions from Saudis, Gates: https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/18/clinton.donations/

I have little doubt there are many ways. These are a bit harder to directly pull a billion dollars out of, though.

It's okay though, they asked congress to investigate the 'market manipulation' suggesting that short sellers were tanking the stock.. All while the majority shareholder makes false and misleading public claims about its fiscal stability to retail investors.

And actively pushing users to retain control over brokers of their shares.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-medias-fight-turns-t...

And they tout the free market. Bulls and Bears for thee, but not for me.

The Trump stock is almost the platonic ideal of a meme stock; just a stock ticker for people to gamble on, without the inconvenience of an actual company attached to it.

Traditional meme stocks (GameStop, Bed Bath and Beyond, AMC, arguably Tesla) have a large, poorly-run company attached, which is really extraneous to the stock's core purpose, that of ensnaring day-traders.

I mean, it's _possible_ the Trump one is driven by the bribery angle, but common things being common it may just be a very compelling meme stock, sharing as it does the name of a meme president.

I always assumed that their inertia (being able to get most milestones from model s to x etc) + charger networks + massive infrastructure and potential applied R&D was the reason for the valuation.

But since the Twitter-Cybertruck era it seems things are cracking in too many places.

Tesla has a P/E of 45.

Overvalued? Certainly. "World's most overvalued stock"? Hardly.

While this is marked as a dupe, there doesn't appear to be any link to the earlier discussion—it appears to be here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40298486

Got a feeling that this August is the last chance Elon has to show off a working believable robotaxi/FSD or the hammer will fall hard on Tesla. There are too many viable options for both electic cars and personal robots out there now.

No hammer is falling. Ultimately any American government loves the idea of an American manufacturer making cars in America too much. Nothing will happen to Musk because without him, Tesla would suddenly be valued as a car manufacturer instead of a fantasy land saviour of the entire world. I don't like Musk, but his distortion field is what keeps their stock price afloat.

The RDF didn't seem to help Twitter much.

Might be, but sales was slowing down in both EU and ASIA in April when the other manufactures had upticks, seems like the Tesla brand is loosing its appeal. A bad q2 and a FSD no-show will probably spook even the most bullish investors.

You are right about this, but I'm not sure this will be true in the coming 10+ years with the inflation reduction act bringing a lot of manufacturing back to the USA. Tesla is becoming one of many.

Not to mention, you know, the consumers who paid for FSD, starting back in 2016, and still don't even have that feature enabled on their cars.

cybertruck owners are too busy gathering their fingers and sewing their leg wounds for now.

ps: https://gizmodo.com/tesla-cybertruck-door-leaves-a-gash-in-o... (warning, fleshwound embeded images )

Pretty insane that there hasn't been a class action law suit yet.

Isn't it in public beta now?

When Tesla entered the fortune 500 and my SPY stock bought it, I was enraged that someone could swindle their way into auto-buys.

Genuinely not sure what to think of the stock market/index funds since that happened. I'd like to get some sort of compensation that is GREATER than my cost.

How can you prove that damages were done to you?

That is the solution to moral dilemmas? Require the (small) victim to provide sufficient evidence to beat the (big power) abuser.

I mean, the idealistic founding fathers might have thought this is how the world will work, but look at reality: Where do you see little guys actually suing the big guys? The damage needs to be so tremendous that you can afford a lawyer to spend years on it.

So anything less than 10 million dollars goes to the big power. The law says "No damages were done". Morally, damages were done to the masses and this billionaire got richer.

Its an organization issue. The damages were done and EVERYONE knows.

Seems far-fetched. No one is forcing you to buy an S&P 500 fund. And you could have sold your S&P 500 shares the day Tesla entered the index.

Do we expect everyone and their grandmas to 'diversify investments without Tesla' and 'know what date Tesla entered the index'?

The government incentivizes retirement and investment. I have plenty of that thing the government hates because it doesnt produce value, it just stores value.

These bad actors have me thinking more and more about these non-producing assets that continue to grow because they are scare and necessary.

Short answer yes. If you invest in the S&P 500 you should know what you’re investing in.

You could be like my buddy and change your 401k allocations to TSLA and some crypto indexes. He said he bought TSLA at a little less than $300. Hopefully he still has some in a target date fund.

What do you mean not sure what to think? Index funds have to follow their prescribed rules. I am also fairly certain any losses you may have experienced would be minor.

Right, there are also SEC rules. Elon broke a bunch and still got into the top 500 companies forcing everyone to buy.

He broke the rules first. The indexes had to follow the rules.

TSLA is still #13 in the S&P500. Regardless of any judgements against Elon the market still is placing a value on the company.

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