He's the CEO of one of the most valuable car companies and the words he speaks affect those trading on that information. Saying whatever he wants for entertainment is horribly irresponsible when his words have financial consequences for real people.

The "funding secured" tweet wasn't harmless, it was a lie that gave a false valuation basis for Tesla at $420. If he was just an employee or outsider that wouldn't matter, but as the CEO he should know better.

There's a gap in thinking here that I'm not really sure how to bridge, but I'll do my best.

In that specific situation, he performed an action, which resulted in a disciplinary action based on some rule somewhere by the SEC.

Some traders won, some lost. I've worked both as, and around traders for a decent period of time. It is what it is.

As far as I'm concerned, it makes life exciting.

I think any concept of 'harm' is pretty far removed from that.

In short, yes, in life, things happen. Other things happen as a result of those things.

We're all here to have fun, in the end.

Unpopular opinion but I’m coming up pretty short on sympathy for someone trading stocks based on a few words in a tweet and then losing their shirt. These people are grownups and fully aware of the risks they are taking when they walk into the casino. Nobody is forcing them to read twitter or take it seriously as a source of investment advice.

The $420 thing didn’t hurt grandma’s pension fund or long term buy-and-holders. It hurt day traders, options traders, shorts, and other gamblers.

I'm sorry but this kind of thinking is so dangerous. Pumping hurts anyone who buys it after the pump, including grandma's pension fund, because now they're buying it at an artificial value.

Traders have a right to accurate information from the officers of the company, which is the whole reason we have regulations in the first place.

Pension funds don't buy the most shorted equity on the market, typically. He's right that the people most affected were in effect gamblers. They gambled on the 5k number happening or not and got creamed in aftermath.

You don't want to live in a world where corporate officers of publicly traded companies can make completely false statements about funding events without severe consequences.

You really just don't actually want that.

Sure. But this can be dealt with via the legal system.

Do the thing, get fined (obviously we should set the fine high enough that it's more than a speed bump), sorted.

We don't want the thing to happen because it causes inefficiency in markets, bad outcomes, etc.

Moralizing it doesn't really serve a purpose.

He's actually CEO of one of the _least_ valuable car companies, but I get your point.

By market cap it is top 5...which is a common measure of value

How so? Tesla is worth more than Ford and GM.

Maybe in la la land where the only thing that matters is market cap or othe rmeasures that don't consider actual revenue.

>The "funding secured" tweet wasn't harmless, it was a lie that gave a false valuation basis for Tesla at $420.

If you make a snap financial judgement based on a single tweet, you deserve to lose money.

Tesla explicitly declared in their official filings that Elon twitter is a source of material news about Tesla Inc.

People got trolled (blatantly so, I and several friends laughed as soon as we saw the price) and deserved it.

I trust his physics knowledge. But 'truth' is very dependent on how you model your world. If he was so rigorous he probably would have done his factory design properly instead of rushing things somehow randomly.