- Elon Musk accused of illegally selling $7.5 billion in Tesla stock in Q4 2022.
- Lawsuit alleges Musk and board violated fiduciary duties by selling shares ahead of disappointing vehicle sales data.
- Shareholder seeks disgorgement of $3 billion in illegal gains and damages from directors for reckless behavior.
Isn’t that the definition of insider trading? Lock him up like Martha, she did way less and served time in a prison resort.
I need to look up how “insider trading” even works.
When you are the CEO, and you make decisions, and you own your own stock - wouldn’t everything you ever do be with insider info? It is just honor system pinky-promise to act in good faith? I mean that sounds super effective.
Normally you publicly say looong in advance, like at least half a year in advance, that you plan to sell this amount of shares at this point in time. No more, no less, not earlier, not later, no backsies.
Well no, there is backsies. You can rescind your intent to sell within a couple days. What most CEOs do is set up regular sells every month way in advance, then choose not to sell unless its opportune at the last minute. If that sounds like it completely defeats the purpose of the rule in the first place, yep! The system is rigged.
Wouldn’t say completely. The notice of intent to sell is not there to prevent CEOs from selling when they want to, it’s to notify you that they could sell this much if they wanted to.
The purpose is just to say that you need to be prepared for a potential sale. If the CEO keeps backing out of a sale, that does hurt your ability to predict when they will but not how much they could sell and therefore how much those sales could potentially affect your investment.
All of that is strategic because otherwise investors could conceivably do the opposite and sell before the CEO is forced to sell and then buy his shares at a lower price. That would mean the stock would tank every time the CEO went to sell. The problem exists because most of the solutions are even worse
That’s a fair point, thank you! I was mostly commenting because that rule gets brought up every time someone talks about insider trading (and musk specifically) as a defense and it’s deeply irritating. It makes sense the rule is more about not hobbling CEO investment than insider trading since it really doesn’t do much to prevent the latter.
The problem exists because most of the solutions are even worse
Everything you said makes a lot of sense, but this drives it home… The stock market is so unbelievably ridiculous. It’s just unmanageable, it’s such a simple idea with such horrible effects it might be a great filter
At my workplace we are only allowed to sell stocks within certain windows, usually it’s a brief period immediately after we publicly release earnings. I think for higher ups it’s even more restrictive.
We had a 2 week window 2 or 3 days after earnings were released.
Edit: You could preschedule sales though like recurring once a month, but it wouldn’t take effect immediately. I can’t remember what the delay on that was, but it might have been starting after the next earnings?
I’ve known people at IC level sell outside of windows and barely get a mention. Some people have odd vesting schedules for things like RSU’s, so sometimes it’s unavoidable.
At higher levels, it’s locked down considerably. My old director said that he had to have a meeting to go through a sale of his stock, so that it could be approved to be out of a window of potential releases in the company outside of his own division. I imagine that at VP+ level you need accountants just to handle what is a few clicks for an average corp worker.
Felon Musk
That’s only the 5th time he commits fraud. He has been at court several times because of his actions. It seems no one really wants to arrest him
He should run for president. He can claim the long form version of his birth certificate says he was born in Hawaii.
“Felonious Musk” might be a good nickname.
I love how resort is tacked on there at the very end. Like you read it in a quiter voice.
Well, she did spend time in Club Fed
Can we revoke his government contracts now?
Can we deport him now?
Dude, you can’t talk about deporting people back to Africa. Not cool.
If he’s from Africa, why is he white?
/ref
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No, that’s counterproductive because the government uses those services. Instead, the government could confiscate his stock in those companies.
Would be nice to have SpaceX be independent of him.
Martha Stewart this motherfucker.
This is bullshit. My EV ETF is not doing well and I’m losing my investment while this jagoff gets to sell his stocks ahead of the announcements and runs away with the money? Fuck that shit.
Shareholders should fucking sue if the government ain’t gonna arrest him for insider trading.
I wish I knew money enough to actually understand your comment, but here we are, both hating Elon and wanting him dealt with. Its beautiful really.
An ETF is an investment fund made up of stocks from different companies. A fund based on electric vehicle market could include Tesla, Chevrolet, Toyota, Ford, Kia and various other companies building EV parts like BASF or Northvolt for batteries or chargers.
The fund could be composed of, say, 30% Tesla, 10% Chevrolet, 10% Kia, 5% Ford, etc.
You can invest in the fund by purchasing parts, which then give you a return based on how many parts you bought and the performance of the stocks in the fund.
Does that make sense?
It does. Thanks. Maybe one day i’ll ve able to put it to use… 😅
You should check out Investopedia. They have a lot of information about this kind of stuff.
Also, ETF stands for “exchange-traded-fund”. I like to know what the initial strand for
It is important. And in this case, it’s even exactly what it says on the label. As long as you know what a fund and an exchange are.
If you’re using the ETF as a long term investment and you believe EVs are key to our future then you shouldn’t worry about this too much (unless the ETF is made up of mostly TSLA in which case I’d not be too happy).
You’ve not lost money until you take it out of your investment.
True.
And Tesla is in the top 10 stocks with the highest percentage in the ETF. But doesn’t hold as much importance as it used to it seems.
I just went and looked again and now the #1 is Nvidia. It used to be Tesla. I guess whoever is managing the fund was good enough to see what was going on and modified the investments.
Forgot the final bullet points
- US Government does jack shit in terms of legal ramifications for breaking law.
- Musk pledges to break US law once again.
That’s called Insider Trading, and is supposed to be illegal.
America
its only illegal if youre dumb enough to not be paying judges and politicians. its not even a lot of money either like a couple thousand and theyll vouch for you
What a joyous year if we could get Trump and Elon in jail this year… They could be roomies!
Neither of them are going to prison. Trump’s judge explicitly said as much during his 10th contempt citation, and Musk has been pissing on the leg of the SEC for the last five years straight with no consequences.
So you’re saying they’re never getting their comeuppance?
Not under a Biden government, no
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Would be a pretty funny “prison break esque” movie though.
The key to escape is Donald’s tiny hands can reach things other prisoners hands are to big for.
And Elmo creates the perfect diversion by convincing every other prisoner to invest in prison coins, only to pump and dump em causing a riot.
Lonnie wouldn’t break investing rules. I trust him. He’s a super genius and will save us all. Now let me go post racist bullshit on his everything app so people will think I’m cool.
He’s a shithead. There will never be meaningful consequences. I hope he takes a rocket into space and never comes back.
I hope it does come back.
In a beautifully catastrophic arial display, of him and the others trying to escape, burning brilliantly on rentry.
“Nobody gets out alive - especially the billionaires” ~Jimbert Morrenstein
No, living on Mars will be terrible. I want him to get what he wants and be slowly poisoned while eating algae surrounded by people he hates in a small tin can buried in the ground.
To be fair, that is clearly his goal.
Used to be you pull this shit (insider trading) and be locked away for life. Times they 'r a changing, indeed.
I don’t know about life. Martha Stewart got 5 months (and some house arrest and probation after that).
Insider trading seems to have been perfectly legal for the last few decades. Nothing will come of this or it would start setting precedent that we could use against our government leaders and other billionaires and federal judges. Not gonna happen.
When are Tesla shareholders going to wake up and understand that he’s scamming them. You’re all dupes and he’s going to ride you to the last second and let you all burn.
They are accepting his request to give him 50b$ worth of extra stock, at the same time as they are laying off people. What a joke.
Punish him daddy
… WHAT’S New in Capitalism…
🫠
So wait, is it OK to do INSIDER TRAIDING now?
Well not for me and you. I have worked for public traded companies before and they would announce blackout periods where we weren’t able to sell. Since we worked inside the company and knew stuff the general public wouldn’t.
Part of the many reasons why I won’t do another 401k and instead use a Roth.
What does a Roth vs 401k have to do with any of this? I buy index funds in both accounts, nothing to do with company stock programs whatsoever.
Well you have to account all the stress the poor people in power have to contend with each day. A little bonus at the end of the line is not that big of a deal. /s
Couldn’t you have posted a non-paywalled article so we don’t have to discuss a headline?
CEOs have to announce they will sell in advance. But, I can’t see if he did this because of what you posted.
Is going to archive.is and copy/pasting the url too hard?
I don’t know, maybe ask the OP?
Apologies, I run the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Firefox so I don’t even notice when sites have paywalls (and I recommend everyone else do the same). It’s right up there with adblockers as being almost an essential component of browsing the web these days.
https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
Here are a few more options for viewing the article without a paywall if you don’t want to install an extension.
