Try calling out a random diver a 'pedo', or perform the most cynical kind of market manipulation (then laughing to the SEC at their face) and your outcome will be very different.
It's Animal Farm all over.
Not just any random diver, a diver who had just helped rescue the lives of several children and adults from what was an internationally known emergency.
If any of us had said what Musk said about the diver, we'd be rightfully dragged through the mud.
Step 2: Publicly lie about some purported acquisition with the purpose of manipulating the stock of said company.
We can talk after you've done that, from jail probably.
You can find a nameless CEO guilty. No one cares. No popular Twitter account or quirky pop culture aspects! But Musk knows his place he has created in our culture has made him untouchable.
You're neither an insider of said companies, nor are you a public figure with enough influence to actually manipulate the market.
A random dude made a post on reddit about how he planned to invest all of his meager (in comparison) savings into GameStop stock. The post caught on, we all know what happened, and he ended up being called by the SEC, accused of market manipulation, among other things.
https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/sec...
The SEC is giving Musk free reign because they know that he can't leave the company because the two entities are so intertwined. Musk wealth is effectively just paper wealth.
The SEC doesn't care that investment bankers consider it real enough to give Musk loans for those pledged shares
They also don't care that the cult of personality he managed to create enable him to constantly not produce results and investors still give him money
In the end the SEC cares about real cash leaving the company coffins and into the owners pockets , not paper wealth swelling.
It's really a M.A.D. game between Musk and the SEC at this point...the SEC is willing to bet that it's not remotely possible that Musk lied through his teeth this whole time just to get to #1 in the paper wealth Forbes list only to implode while at the top.
Musk on the other hand doesn't strike me as a cold calculator such as Gates or Brin or Zuck, he is much more impulsive and there are non-zero chances that he did just that.
Elon doesn't get any special treatment. You can do all these things as well if you're willing to expend resources when faced with repercussions. My suspicion though is society will give you more slack if you dramatically increase access to space for your nation state or make credible progress against a global ecological problem humanity is facing.
> It's Animal Farm all over
Don't get the Animal Farm reference as we're not talking about some sort of proto-communist utopia. Everyone is playing in the same sandbox.