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At this point, the board of directors should just demand deletion of his Twitter account. I admire Elon for his vision, and actually also admire his radical st
by spectramax 8y ago
At this point, the board of directors should just demand deletion of his Twitter account.
I admire Elon for his vision, and actually also admire his radical style despite of its unpopular image - I watched the video where he smoked pot on the radio show. It was a really amazing conversation about future of humanity. He just needs to stop tweeting. You may say it’s fixing the symptom, but here if we take Twitter away, he would stop yelling stupid FCC punishable things.
As a side note, Twitter has hardly done anything useful for the society. I never got into twitter and never understood its value. Conversations are one sided, blog posts are separated into incomprehensible chain of tweets, people are insulting with no repercussion - it’s a giant echo chamber of loud people. One thing it has done is to improve customer support by shaming companies publicly, which is a really sad state of affairs.
- mlindner 8y agoYour comment should have stayed dead, I don't know how you revived it. The board of directors demanding he delete his Twitter account is pointless. He would just refuse. Secondly, this has nothing to do with the FCC. Thirdly, your personal hatred of Twitter is completely off topic.
- halvingalg 8y agoTwitter is decidedly on-topic since it is Elon's misbehavior on twitter that got him into this whole mess.
- spectramax 8y agoYou’re right - SEC I meant, not FCC. I’m just speaking my mind, new to this site. Sorry to have disappointed you.
- Waterluvian 8y ago...Can a corporation demand an employee waive their right to speech as a private citizen? I think even if so, that's a terrible idea.
- javagram 8y agoOf course they can (and often do).
- grigjd3 8y agoI mean, I'm fairly certain that if I started publicly bad-mouthing my company and they noticed, I'd be canned.
- mlindner 8y agoCanned by the company yes, not canned by the government.
- detaro 8y agoGP clearly asked about a company.
- grigjd3 8y agoGovernment isn't canning Musk. They're fining him for releasing material misinformation about his company. This has been well established in the law.
- eduah 8y agoNot misinformation, guidance was 350 - 500. This is a technicality of not getting approval for a tweet that could be interpreted as saying they are definitely hitting 500k 8 months from now. This is stupid. https://twitter.com/_jameshatfield_/status/1100177298723094528 https://twitter.com/_jameshatfield_/status/11001772987230945...
- gamblor956 8y agoIn the time between Elon's two tweets, enough trades could have occurred based on the misrepresentation that investors were financially harmed. The point of the SEC is to prevent harms like that. The point of the SEC's 2018 settlement with Elon was to prevent him from investor-harming tweets like the one he made by requiring tweets about Tesla to be reviewed for accuracy and correctness before posting.
- slouch 8y agoHow about, "helped every piece of news break faster." I knew about every trade during the run up to today's 3pm NHL trade deadline many minutes and sometimes hours before the stories appeared on nhl.com or sportsnet, etc.
- halvingalg 8y agoI enjoy reading about political news immediately but often times the breaking stories are wildly incorrect/off and I would benefit from more restrained and thoughtful coverage. Taking more time to make decisions rarely leads to bad decisions...
- gist 8y ago> I knew about every trade during the run up to today's 3pm NHL trade deadline many minutes and sometimes hours before the stories appeared on nhl.com or sportsnet, etc. Is that just for entertainment or did you use that information in some way? It's similar to papers or tv stations crowing how they broke a story. So what? Do I really need (or do most people) to know that there is a mass tragedy (only one example) the minute it happens? It can't wait? Not everything that happens is '911' grade information.
- praneshp 8y ago> Is that just for entertainment "just" is just your opinion > Do I really need (or do most people) to know I do.
- Dylan16807 8y ago> "just" is just your opinion Reading the entire sentence makes it clear that "just" refers to whether or not they "use that information in some way", and that is not an opinion. > I do. You cut off "the minute it happens". It's not about whether you learn it, but how rapidly.
- hopler 8y agoIf you want to make money betting on the info, you do. Breaking a story matters if no one else was looking, but yeah not of everyone was racing.
- mLuby 8y agoTwitter's value is providing a direct connection from people of note to the masses, bypassing newspaper/TV/radio gatekeepers of yesteryear. You could argue whether that itself is good for society, but it is clear from Twitter's usage that people find it valuable.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoIt is useful for self promoters and day traders, others not so much.
- blhack 8y agoThere are lots of ways of accomplishing that without the things that causes twitter to be particularly toxic.
- astrodust 8y agoTwitter's toxic because they never clean the place up. It's like a hotel where they clean the rooms only when it gets so bad that the EPA or CDC issues a citation.
- rchaud 8y ago> Twitter's value is providing a direct connection from people of note to the masses, bypassing newspaper/TV/radio gatekeepers of yesteryear. Press releases still exist. Although even then I'd wager the copy writers do a better job of legal due diligence than Musk.
- P_I_Staker 8y agoIt's not the same thing, however I do think CEOs having a direct link to communicate with the public is incredibly irresponsible; unless you keep everything extremely trivial, light, and unoffensive. Otherwise everything should be vetted and / or double checked by at least one even headed, conservative person (in terms of risk, not politics), who has some understanding of PR.
- danvayn 8y ago
- privateSFacct 8y agoHe doesn't need to delete it, but if he is going to post market moving information (like production for 2019 is not 400K but 500K) he'd get the approved by someone else like Tesla's GC.
- minimaxir 8y agoIncidentally Tesla's new GC has only been on the job for 5 days after the previous GC left two months into the job. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/20/tesla-replaces-general-counsel-dane-butswinkas.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/20/tesla-replaces-general-couns...
- femto113 8y agoIt's possible this isn't a coincidence, the tweet in question seems to have come out just before the last GC left, I wonder if it sparked a conflict.
- zebraflask 8y agoOn the other hand, how is that market-moving given Elon's very public history of stirring the pot? You expect this from him.
- michaelt 8y agoI think for most crimes, saying "But I have a well known history of doing this" would make prosecutors less lenient, not more.
- zebraflask 8y agoThe legality is above my pay grade and will have to be deferred to the experts. Just from an economic line of thought, even a cursory look at Tesla and Elon's history of public statements would make a reasonable investor think "Gee, the CEO talks a lot. Maybe don't read too much into it."
- 8y ago
- CalChris 8y agoTwitter has hardly done anything useful for the society. Yes, but Facebook has done even less.
- api 8y agoTwitter is where the rich and powerful go to make complete fools of themselves.
- buboard 8y agoThe rules never apply equally to everyone. Tesla needs elon and elon needs twitter to hype up millions of people so he can achieve his goals. I m not a fan of the guy, but he's got the resolve to make things happen. if you take away his twitter, it will be bad for the future of tesla.
- sokoloff 8y agoI worry that if you don't take away his Twitter, it will also be bad for the future of Tesla.
- xiphias2 8y agoA part of the development of new Tesla car features, and the deal with Australian battery plant were happening on Twitter with his account. Closing it down would hurt Tesla. The solution is having a reviewer for each tweet, just how Elon and SEC agreed.
- roenxi 8y agoOdds are great that the battery thing on twitter was a PR stunt for public consumption, not substantive decision making. People don't negotiate infrastructure deals on twitter and email is just as good for actually doing business deals. In the event that anything actually happened on twitter, someone was probably being negligent in terms of tendering and governance. It doesn't make sense for a few tweets to be critical, so they probably weren't.
- xiphias2 8y agoIt was PR, and maybe a stunt as well, but it worked. It put a huge social pressure on the corrupt Australian politicians who kept the electricity system in their country far behind what Australia can afford. The public actually deserves to take part in what their tax payments are used for.
- oxymoran 8y agoI would rather he just let someone else handle Tesla and focus on SpaceX, Neuralink, and whatever other private ventures. He just isn’t meant to head a public company.
- m_mueller 8y agoIsn’t one of Tesla’s problems that they don’t have an operations chief of the caliber of Shotwell? They essentially need their own Tim Cook - boring but dedicated and gets things done.
- telospolis 8y agoI got my first job from twitter. I learn from the smartest people in SV sitting 1000s of miles away. Your twitter is an echo chamber. Mine isn't.
- omarforgotpwd 8y agoI don't think he needs to stop tweeting. He just needs to make sure all the tweets that contain information material to Tesla are reviewed prior to publication, like he agreed to in the judgement.
- duxup 8y agoIt really only shames companies for the few customers who get attention too.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoTwitter is a giant customer service system. It’s more effective than sitting on hold waiting for a giant company to ignore you. One reasonable tweet about an issue and usually a customer service rep reaches out. I tweeted about how a company saved Christmas for our family with a last minute furniture delivery. We were going to take a secondary choice on color for that item to arrive on time. The CEO of the company got involved and we got the right color on time. Company is LoveSac and they were great but wouldn’t have even know about the issue without Twitter.
- Marsymars 8y agoI wish companies would enable whoever is manning their public emails to fix problems as effectively as whoever is manning the twitter account.
- rchaud 8y ago> Twitter is a giant customer service system. Only if there's a good PR opportunity to be had, which is exactly the case you described.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> the board of directors should just demand deletion of his Twitter account That’s extreme. Just give the securities lawyer the password. Elon clearly lacks the discipline to work with pre-approval. So have him draft tweets, send them to the lawyer, and then watch them go live. He can read his feed but not write to it.
- vinay_ys 8y agoSo apparently, Elon's twitter account is seen as source of official news about Tesla by investors [0]. Given that, it is reasonable for SEC to take this position. But on a bigger scheme, it is sad to see this happening while "puffery" is legal and the damage it is causing is far bigger than anything elon's tweets have caused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0CyBv18A5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0CyBv18A5k 0. This line is in the 2013 8-K filing by Tesla: "For additional information, please follow Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s Twitter accounts: twitter.com/elonmusk and twitter.com/TeslaMotors "
- dragonwriter 8y agoPuffery is a form of lying to consumers, Musk's problem is with laws around lying to investors. “Capitalism” wasn't named “capitalism” by it's opponents because it protects consumers and leaves capitalists out in the cold.
- notacoward 8y agoAs with most social media, what you get out of Twitter is largely a function of who you follow. Using it as a "direct connection from people of note" is using it exactly wrong IMO. That makes it just another megaphone for advertisers, politicians, and entertainers. Personally I find it much better to follow people whose ideas and perspective I already find valuable. Some I know IRL. Some I know from their work, or from blogs/forums including this one. Some I was "introduced to" by these others, in the sense of repeatedly seeing retweets or responses and finding them valuable. I can get the news a bazillion different ways. I don't need Twitter for that. But I also enjoy seeing the reaction from the various communities of which I'm a part, from work to the ski club to the people I follow on Twitter or Facebook. Social media is much better when it's social, not broadcast. Am I in danger of creating my own little bubble this way? Sure, as has always been the case with RL associations as well, and the remedy is the same as well - learn critical thinking, don't rely on any one of them for your information, etc. And even if each of my social-media "avatars" is in a bubble at least it's my bubble, the result of my own conscious curation and not someone else's idea of what bubble I should be stuffed into.
- dalbasal 8y agoBasically, he needs a pepper pots. Incidentally, I think we should have referendums (local, national, scotland..) to ban leaders from twitter. Maybe Jack Dorsey could be sold on this.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI used to find Twitter a really great outlet for my brain when I needed a 60 second break from a task, and no more. I kept my feed fairly sparse, and tweets were so short, so I could glance at my timeline without worrying about getting lost and losing track of time. They have since slowly killed this value, by changing how the timeline is ordered, increased character limit, etc.
- fredgrott 8y agolack of impulse control has no relationship to having a twitter account..board needs to do its financial duty and remove him