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Comment by mmmm2 | Hacker News Reader

Pump and dump scheme?

What evidence is there for the 'dump' part?

Mr Musk is a strange fellow indeed, but he's not guilty of all the vices and sins. Just plenty enough of them.

That’s a fair point, but a combination of “fake it ‘til you make it” together with extracting massive “compensation” before you actually make it amounts to pretty much the same thing.

How is it the 'same thing'? Especially if he gets his comp largely in the same supposedly overvalued stock?

How is that different from any other CEO, especially of publicly traded companies?

CEOs are constantly making claims and promises that are aspirational at best, their compensation isn't held until all promises are reached.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/05/31/tes...

> Musk sold 19.5 million Tesla shares worth about $3.95 billion in November 2022

I mean sure it is his to sell, but how is that different?

That was to buy Twitter.

Does using the money from the dump to do something else make it no longer a dump?

I'm fairly sure this was not a pump-and-dump.

My evidence is that in America people sue for these things left and right all the time. It's a popular pastime for lawyers to get a class action lawsuit for securities fraud together. But as far as I can tell, Musk / Tesla weren't convicted of these things in conjunction with the sale of Tesla stock to buy Twitter.

There is a meme for this kind of move. It's pump and dump because it isn't worth what the underlying assets are worth and because there is a sale. Whether people sue for it and whether or not they were convicted is immaterial.

You know that's the timeframe of the Twitter acquisition right?

So is your issue here that a CEO makes public claims if his company that may be predictions or aspirations for the future, then sells shares he owns in the company to buy another company?

Exactly my issue. The same way scams are "predictions and future aspirations".

Fair enough. I may just be cynical enough to assume CEOs are always talking out of their ass with regards to the future, but I do understand if people would rather things not work this way.

I'd say more in Doge and Bitcoin but you could argue with his stocks even though they're announced/scheduled.

As Matt Levine points out, Musk does plenty of crypto price moving with his tweets, but he doesn't seem to trade on them.

Do you have evidence on this? Seems like it would be fairly difficult to track. Have people been able to associate his wallets with him?

Maybe I'm misremembering but I seem to recall him (Tesla?) selling a bunch of doge and bitcoin after months of pumping despite some big drops between.

IIRC, back in 2022 or so he'd made about as much selling TSLA shares as Tesla Inc. has made lifetime profits selling cars.

Tesla's profits have been positive since then, so this may no longer be the case, but still, that's a very iffy state of affairs.

That's more a sign of how poorly investors in the stock market today understand fundamentals, or how little they regard fundamentals.

It's not the usual type of 'dump', but he will probably again request massive bonus or threaten to leave. And his statements are the key for pumping part.

He might be pumping until his potential trillion USD bonus :P

his family is going to need it, the guy is the modern genghis khan in a generation or two a good portion of humanity will be a descendant of his

At the current growth rate, they'll be 2.5Billion in just 8 generations...

He has been selling a lot of Tesla stocks through the life of the company (not that it matters to him as other shareholders are giving him load of free shares all the time).

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