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Comment by freerobby | Hacker News Reader

> It's also worth mentioning that the idea of breaking long-term financial news for a Fortune 500 company via Twitter of all places is highly unorthodox and suspect in its own right, so I doubt this comment would have much effect in practice.

Elon can't have this both ways, though. Tesla has disclosed that it will use social media for financially material announcements, and Elon has embraced this. It can't be legitimate most of the time and illegitimate when it makes for a convenient defense.

Personally, I don't think Elon's intention was to defraud -- I think he was impulsive and careless, and I expect the SEC will reach the same conclusion. But I think if he's going to use Twitter to talk about such things, his tweets need to carry the same weight as an equivalent SEC filing.

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> But I think if he's going to use Twitter to talk about such things, his tweets need to carry the same weight as an equivalent SEC filing.

A tweet is not an SEC filing and it can never be one. It’s 140 characters typed on your phone. It is not reviewed by corporate counsel. It is not reviewed at all.

I’m going to step out on a limb and say this is an important mode of communication. I like having this window into Musk’s operations.

But a tweet is just a tweet. It’s never the whole story. Here we are dissecting two single words, and some people are saying jail a man.

I say no two words on Twitter can jail a man. Fine him a million dollars a word if you have to.

> I say no two words on Twitter can jail a man. Fine him a million dollars a word if you have to.

By convention, with two words you're 1/3 of the way to a hanging.

> A tweet is not an SEC filing and it can never be one. It’s 140 characters typed on your phone. It is not reviewed by corporate counsel. It is not reviewed at all.

Right, but this is exactly the downside of disclosing things via Twitter. If Elon uses tweets and SEC filings interchangeably (that is what he's doing here -- this would ordinarily be disclosed in an 8-K), the rules are going to apply to both. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to his intentions, but the SEC can't carve out exceptions for impulsive behavior just because it happened on social media -- traders are acting on this information in real time and need to be able to trust it.

(I agree the calls for imprisonment are beyond insane; I focus on the Twitter vs 8-K part of the story because I find it more interesting, and I'd like to see more CEOs speak directly to followers as Elon does but with a bit less impulsivity).

> I say no two words on Twitter can jail a man.

What about "I confess"? :)

Nevertheless, I think the spirit of your argument is mostly valid. Musk is doing the equivalent of Roosevelt's fireside chats. Granted, he should be smarter than to tweet willy-nilly, but I suppose we can say the same for just about everybody on Twitter nowadays...

I also don't think pumping up stock price to avoid a convertible bond conversion is fraud. And of course OJ is innocent too.

This is clearly not what happened, and never was planned to happen.

The bonds don’t convert for another year.

You don’t send a tweet about something that will immediately have a thousand people banging down your door for answers and expect it to move the stock price a year later.

There was zero personal financial incentive for Musk to deceive with the tweet.

As it happens, the criminal statute requires that a purchase or sale of securities takes place, so I can’t see how it applies.

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