Elon Musk deleted a tweet in which he alluded to Tesla potentially becoming the largest company in the world “in just a few months”.
The SEC may be watching …
Musk’s use of Twitter has been under scrutiny by financial authorities for some time.
Most famously, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Musk for its infamous “guaranteed finance” tweet about its failed attempt to make Tesla private in 2018.
The SEC found Musk overreacted when he said the funding was “guaranteed”. Tesla and Musk reached an agreement with the SEC.
As part of the deal, Musk agreed to step down as chairman of the board, and both Tesla and Musk each had to pay $ 20 million in fines.
The CEO presumably did not want Tesla to pay for his issuance with the SEC, and although he could not pay Tesla’s share of the fine directly, he decided to buy $ 20 million in Tesla shares.
So he kind of indirectly ended up paying for Tesla’s fine – although he also ended up with ~ 71,000 additional Tesla shares in the process.
As we reported earlier, Musk ended up making money from the deal due to the rise in Tesla’s share price last year.
The SEC also asked Tesla to oversee Musk’s use of Twitter so that he did not share material information that could influence the market.
Now the situation is coming up again, as Musk tweeted something that could fall into that category.
In our Slack newsroom in Electrek, we have an automated Musk tweets feed set up. From time to time, among all the memes he tweets, there are interesting items.
Today we woke up with a series of tweets, and the last one was deleted:
Regarding the impact of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving launch on the carmaker’s assessment, Musk said there was more than a 0% chance that Tesla would become the largest company in the world.
This is something he said earlier and is not relevant to Tesla’s assessment.
However, someone with the Twitter identifier @ ToonLa24 replied that he “liked the direction of that arrow” in reference to the “more than” sign that Musk used, and the CEO surprisingly responded with “probably in a few months”.
Many people interpreted the tweet as Musk saying that Tesla could become the largest company in the world in a few months, but that is not clear.
The CEO quickly deleted the tweet under which many people commented that it could be relevant information and against the SEC’s order.
Electrek’s Take
Personally, I don’t see any problems here.
Musk believes that Tesla could become the largest company in the world if it solves the problem of autonomous driving is not material, it is obvious.
I would even venture to say that most people agree that if Tesla suddenly gets its vision-based autonomous system using its current hardware, which is already in hundreds of thousands of regulator-approved cars, it will likely unlock hundreds of billions in value .
The question is more whether Tesla can accomplish this feat and in what timeline.
Musk has already said that this would happen this year and, therefore, it would not be surprising if Tesla became the largest company in the world this year.
But he has been wrong about this timeline before, and many people have doubts about it happening.
Anyway, I don’t see the SEC chasing this one, as it doesn’t seem to have any impact on Tesla’s shares in any way.
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