Experts believe the SEC faces significant challenges if it proceeds with fraud charges. “Courts typically prefer fraud cases that involve clear false statements,” said Fagel. “Transforming a regulatory violation into fraud, especially one involving delayed disclosure, can be an uphill battle.”

James Park, a securities law expert at UCLA, added, “Regulators could potentially frame this as a case of market deception, which complicates matters compared to straightforward falsehoods. It’s a nuanced issue but significant enough to warrant serious consideration.”

The biggest thing in their favor is a firefighters pension that sold at a lower than expected price if he had made the disclosure. They're not wrong, but it's a lie of omission type thing. We'll see if it flies over the next 5 years of appeals and shenanigans. Meanwhile he wrote himself a check on Tesla stockholders dime to cover the Twitter fuck up. I'm betting he fucks them over as Tesla spirals into a crater.

eestileeb SLAMS misleading incendiary headline

He didn’t get it yet.

Securities Fraud isn't “disrupting markets”. Its a crime

People like you would absolutely hate what a "free market" actually is because it means monopolies and price gouging and that means you would be paying far more for everything.

he's batshit crazy enough to actually disrupt markets. That's the whole point of the USA right now isn't it?!

Nope. Even the Silicon Valley cult wants to disrupt the markets by being more profitable than others, NOT by being an incompetent and unhinged fraud like Musk.

Just let the dude be crazy and innovate

He hasn't been innovative, he's been throwing money at others to innovate for him. Sometimes he'll give them vague (and often impossible to follow) guidelines, but otherwise, he's in the business of spending money so that other people with actual expertise make money for him.

That's why he's made such a shit show out of Twitter: for the first time, he's not just the money man. He's actually the one making important decisions and he's REALLY fucking bad at it.

The fact that he's a narcissistic bigot who loves the far right and will do anything to avoid admitting his mistakes of course compounds the harm.

If there was a company that had a baboon as the CFO and every time it pressed a button the company would just light $1m on fire, and you know this because it's one of the world's most famous baboons, and you choose to give this company your money, why am I supposed to feel bad when the baboon presses the button?

Because cult brainwashing and hero worship of conmen are things. Like with Trump, some people think Musk can walk on water and would follow his lead and back his companies no matter what.

When those people lose their life savings, they aren't the only ones getting hurt: their families who might disagree will be destitute too. Them not having money to spend on goods and services hurts local businesses that they might otherwise spend money on. It all ripples out and, when the scale is big enough, hurts everyone except the debt profiteering vulture industry and the baboon himself.

Let idiots be idiots. It's the free market.

The market is NOWHERE near free. The deck is very much stacked in favor of billionaires, especially hectobillionaires like Musk. And even THEN, he still breaks the law to stack it further, to the detriment of society as a whole.

That's not letting idiots be Idiots (which is already a bad idea, as I explained above), that's letting an already extremely privileged money hoarding man-child defraud everyone else to further increase his obscene dragon's hoard of riches.