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Musk’s Money Mystery Intrigues SEC
- chaibizi 8y agohmmmmm
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- matthoiland 8y agoIs Musk constantly inside-joking himself? Why $420 a share? Why do his car models spell S3X? Is his internal email bong69@boring.com? I love this guy.
- dewey 8y agoI’d file that under childish and awkward instead of funny.
- eanzenberg 8y agoDo you think calling heroes "pedos" is funny too?
- AlexeyBrin 8y agoDo you think it make sense to judge the entire work/life of someone by an affirmation made at some point in the past on a public forum ? From a moral point of view people are not black and white, there are infinite shades of grey in between. If you dig deep enough you will find morally questionable things in everybody's past. That being said, that tweet was a bad idea.
- eanzenberg 8y agoThat's just the tip of the iceberg for Elon. He has a lot to answer for Tesla including the "self-driving" claim fiascos and all this erratic behavior. He puts video games into the center console of the Model 3 while also claiming that drivers need to pay complete attention during operation. Compared to Sergey, Besoz or Tim Cook and I'd rather have them as CEO than someone interested in "memes".
- Freestyler_3 8y agoOne of the reasons to go private... no shareholders that demand a bland CEO.
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y agoMaybe the "hero" shouldn't be throwing insults on twitter like a child. I thought the insult was well considered because, in context, the diver was going after kids. It's a sly kind of funny that someone from another country might think is very funny.
- propman 8y agoThis is the first comment I’ve seen approving that tweet and it’s every bit as deluded and cringeworthy as I’d expect. Musk never even apologized for that one did he?
- lorenzhs 8y agoDon't forget that the Model 3 was originally planned to be "Model E", but Ford owns the rights to that name. Also, there's a planned compact SUV which goes by "Model Y". U+1F644
- iwaffles 8y agoHe even made a public comment "Ford is trying to kill SEX" https://jalopnik.com/ford-killed-sex-1585513454 https://jalopnik.com/ford-killed-sex-1585513454
- mandeepj 8y agoNo, he is not that interesting with email ids. It's just elon@tesla.com
- sigfubar 8y agoI once worked for a company where the CTO's e-mail was aliased as pigfucker@domain.com.
- mandeepj 8y agoIn India, 420 means scam\fraud. Just sharing the other (interesting) side. I don't think Musk used this number for any fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_420_of_the_Indian_Penal_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_420_of_the_Indian_Pena... https://www.quora.com/What-does-420-mean-in-India https://www.quora.com/What-does-420-mean-in-India
- toyg 8y ago> Why $420 a share Beause 42 is always a good answer, maybe.
- kokey 8y agoPerhaps the funding he secured involved Tesla's revenue sources to include cannabis operations.
- Reedx 8y agoAlso BFR (Big Fucking Rocket). Inside jokes like that are a way of communicating with other nerds and gamers.
- guelo 8y agoYea my first thought was that Musk was just trying to squeeze the shorts, but that would be highly illegal. Musk can't be that stupid. The CEO of a publicly traded company can't act like Trump and tweet in bad-faith to try to bully reality into conforming to his wishes.
- confiscate 8y agoI suppose the CEO of a publicly trading company CAN act like the President of the United States? Seems like a good strategy actually. The strategy got Donald Trump the Presidency. (edit): why all the downvotes? I realize my comment might have come off as sarcastic. Sorry that was not my intent--I just wanted to point out something I noticed.
- taobility 8y agoLol, a private company CEO should be more serious than USA president?! At least I didn't see from where Trump is not serious about his tweet.
- toyg 8y ago> a private company CEO should be more serious than USA president We live in interesting times. Statistically speaking, a jackass CEO is born every minute, whereas a jackass POTUS is very, very rare.
- eanzenberg 8y agoWall st is not really buying it either. Time will tell, of course, but the shorts may end up winning big in the end.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Robotbeat 8y agoThis is an opinion piece and not very informative.
- minimaxir 8y agoNothing wrong with opinion pieces on Hacker News.
- kokey 8y agoI also can't help myself from reading opinion pieces from Matt Levine most days of the week.
- skybrian 8y agoIt does explain why the situation looks weird, for anyone who didn't understand that already. There's not much else you can say about it, other than joke about it.
- Tomte 8y agoOn the contrary, there's lots of information. It's the first real attempt at analyzing the legality of it all that I've seen.
- deathanatos 8y agoAnd Mr. Levine's writing is highly entertaining, in addition to giving a clear explanation that the layman can understand of the story. And the entertainment value is because the situation is actually ridiculous to begin with.
- nmeofthestate 8y ago"$420" - pretty sure this is Musk just being his hilarious mad lad self as usual.
- 1001101 8y agoI've read speculation that this was a pot joke. Fortunes were made and lost after he made that comment.
- dragontamer 8y ago> Of course the SEC is looking into this. I can’t think of a thing that the SEC would look into more. If Warren Buffett was giving insider tips about accounting fraud at the Fed to Lloyd Blankfein so that he could help Donald Trump and the pope insider trade against the Illuminati, the SEC team investigating that would be scheming to get transferred to the Elon Musk team. Obviously, this is a silly article. But the point remains: Mr. Musk clearly put himself at risk with that tweet. The core questions are: 1. Was Mr. Musk telling the truth about "secured funding" ? 2. What is the SEC's plan of action on investigating this matter? The opinion piece otherwise doesn't contribute much information, aside from giggles and snide comments. It will be a mystery. Feds often don't like talking about pending cases, so it could be weeks, or even months, before any official action comes down from this. And who knows? Maybe Musk really is telling the truth about secured funding and there's no fraud involved. EDIT: Yo downvotes: care to explain why you're downvoting a direct quote from the article? As I stated above: the opinion piece is clearly a silly piece of work that doesn't contribute much to the discussion. The core facts are still "at large" and we really won't get much information on this matter for weeks and/or months. That's really all there is to this story.
- eanzenberg 8y agoProbably because it's not quite an opinion piece. A buyout at this massive scale would've been rumored by now by the potential suiters. The only other alternative is single-buyers who are willing to put up that much personal capital, also highly unlikely.
- imron 8y agoLarry Page is on record a few years back saying he'd give his fortune to Musk rather than donate it to charity [0]. I imagine Musk has a handful of billionaire friends he could probably hit up for cash. Throw in some money from SpaceX, and he could probably make the buyout price. 0: https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-elon-musk-2014-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-elon-musk-2014-3
- dragontamer 8y ago
- starshadowx2 8y ago"or that the real financing is the friends we made along the way." I love it every time this type of line is used.
- Freestyler_3 8y agoIf hoaxing inevitably lands you on a loss, why would it be a hoax?
- davesque 8y agoThe problem, at this point, is that I think the average person must find all this very tiresome. Let's set aside all the theories about whether or not Musk is actually a stable genius for doing everything he's done lately (including calling one of his critics "pedo guy"). With everything that's going on in the world today, I just don't have the energy to keep up with all this grandstanding. The result? I'm sick of hearing about Elon Musk. I'm sick of hearing what he has to say. I'm sick of thinking about Tesla and, now, I probably won't ever buy one.
- atombender 8y agoI don't think that's "the problem". There's plenty of demand for the cars. Elon Musk fatigue may be a real thing, but that's more related to the news cycle (and the Twitter cycle), in my opinion, than Musk himself.
- theDoug 8y agoI wonder why the media new cycle keeps making him say outlandish stuff! What do the majority of other company CEOs have over the entire industry and Twitter to somehow appear to be quietly doing their job?
- Krasnol 8y agoIf you cry for attention when times are good, you shouldn't complain about attention when times are bad.
- davesque 8y agoI expect to see that demand shrink. If I find his behavior lately to be weird, I think that other people will as well. I'm also perfectly happy to vote with my dollars.
- sfarnan 8y agoHow’s this Elon’s fault? He’s endlessly criticized in unjustified ways. That guy didn’t reasonably critize Elon’s plans, he instantly attacked his motives and said to stick his submarine up his rearend. And 10% of Thailand’s GDP is based on the sex industry or $6.4 billion a year. “Pedo” is kind of a misused connotation but when people get attacked their impulse is to respond with a personal attack. It’s not a “meltdown”. It’s just human nature magnified by Twitter.
- dang 8y agoMuskMania has reached information heat death: it can generate nothing new on its own. See the thread below for a good example. Since this article doesn't supply enough new information to get us out of that state, we're treating it as a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709543. When significant new information arises (note: not the same thing as the next provocation), then there will be something to discuss.
- _fizz_buzz_ 8y agoI feel this is a questionable call. The SEC questioning Tesla is in my opinion a pretty significant development. Also, I think this was the only Tesla article on the front page - not exactly a mania ...
- dang 8y agoThe mania isn't in having more than one article on the front page at a time (though that happened repeatedly yesterday). It's in rehashing the same cartoonish argument over and over. Elon is a superhero! vs. no way he's a supervillain! That monster has been bred, of course, by the hyper feedback loop between Musk and the media. A hyperloop, you might call it. But we've passed the point at which it's all noise. Our kingdom for some signal.
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y agoThe article here has a lot of information that the one you linked to does not. I understand the fatigue, but this is no dupe.
- Tomte 8y agoMatt Levine writes entertainingly, but in both today's and yesterday's newsletter is more information than in all the "Tesla going private" article in the last days.
- dang 8y agoI appreciate Matt Levine's columns too, but the amount of information needed is relative to HN's capacity to discuss a topic substantively. In this case that capacity is unusually low, so the amount of substantiveness the article needs to provide is unusually high. The proof that this one didn't get there is in the pudding of the discussion that resulted.
- csours 8y agoDISCLAIMER: I work for a Tesla competitor, any opinions are solely my own. I am not a financial analyst, I may be a lizard-person. If I were Elon, I would love it if I could take my company private and keep my fans as shareholders. I would love it if I could "go private" and not have to actually buy back all of the shares of people who want to go long anyway. I would love it if shorts had no mechanism to short my company. I would love it, but I don't know if I could find a real financial instrument that allows for it.