Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Friday morning that “I think there is more than a 0% chance that Tesla will be the biggest company” and added “probably within a few months” in responses to followers.
Musk’s tweet offering guidance on the time for an anticipated increase in Tesla’s market capitalization was deleted, but the screenshots were widely shared on Twitter.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has already clashed with Musk and Tesla over the CEO’s unrestricted use of Twitter.
In the third quarter of 2018, Musk faced charges of SEC securities fraud after he tweeted to his tens of millions of followers that he planned to make Tesla private for $ 420 per share and had secured funding for it. Tesla’s stock price rose more than 6% that day.
Musk and Tesla reached an agreement, with the CEO individually and the company each paying a $ 20 million fine and agreeing that they could not plead innocence, among other terms.
However, the SEC sued him for breach of that agreement after he tweeted about Tesla’s production numbers in early 2019, which they said was a violation of the terms.
As a term of the revised agreement, Tesla is required to approve all written communications, including tweets and other social media posts, which Musk intends to share that contain material information about the company. The company has never publicly said who plays the role known, in jargon, as Elon Musk’s “twitter sitter”.
More recently, a Tesla shareholder named Chase Gharrity filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Chancellery Court over the continued use of Musk’s Twitter, saying it cost shareholders billions of dollars in losses, for example, when he tweeted in May 2020 that Tesla’s stock price was too high in his opinion. Tesla’s shares fell 10 percent thereafter, representing a drop of more than $ 13 billion in Tesla’s market value.
Musk also commented on the price of the cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, through tweets from his account, which currently has 49.7 million followers.
Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board decided and ordered Tesla to instruct Musk to remove previous tweets that the federal agency considered threatening to employees. The company and Musk have time to comply with the order, but the offending material has not yet been removed from Twitter.
The SEC and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.