On paper, Elon Musk seems like he would be an incredibly cool dude. A tech billionaire focusing on sustainability all while making cool space shit that he names after stuff from Iain M Banks books? One that (at least nominally) smokes weed? Theoretically: cool as hell. In practice: just kind of a weird guy.
[jwplayer KlaiocWU]
Somehow, Musk managed to squander a lot of the public’s goodwill, which might have something to do with Tesla and Musk’s reputed hostility to unions or maybe even that time Musk baselessly called a rescue diver a paedophile.
His Twitter presence certainly hasn’t helped him, to the point that in September Musk had to fork out $27.7 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for tweeting about taking Tesla private at a cool weed-number-esque $420 US a share, despite Musk knowing “that the potential transaction was uncertain and subject to numerous contingencies“. The SEC said that the tweet caused Tesla’s stock price to increase by “over six percent” and “led to significant market disruption“.
According to the SEC, one of the terms of the settlement was that Tesla would establish “additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications“. According to Musk, that has pretty much not happened.
In an interview with 60 Minutes (the US one), he said that no one was monitoring his tweets in advance, with the exception of ones that had a “probability of causing a movement in the stock“, adding “otherwise it’s — hello, first amendment. Like, freedom of speech is fundamental.” Challenged on how this could be determined if no one is actually checking them, he just says that they “might make some mistakes sometimes“. Genius stuff.
You can watch the video of a bafflingly wet-eyed Musk being visibly upset that the SEC is stopping him from tweeting weed jokes that cause stock prices to fluctuate below:
Elon Musk—while fighting off tears—says that Tesla can’t review his tweets because of “the First Amendment” and that he does not respect the Securities and Exchange Commission, which fined him and Tesla $40 million earlier this year.pic.twitter.com/hNH2UK6TmI
— jordan (@JordanUhl) December 10, 2018
