Hyperdrive
Tesla Investors to Get $12,000 Each From Musk’s SEC Deal
- Losses were $12 billion, plaintiffs claimed in separate case
- Musk’s famous tweet about taking Tesla private roiled shares
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A group of Tesla Inc. investors stands to recover an average of about $12,000 a head for losses they incurred from Elon Musk’s famous 2018 tweet that he had “funding secured” to take the carmaker private at $420 a share — and then didn’t.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission aims to pay the investors the $40 million plus interest that Tesla’s chief executive officer and the company agreed to as civil penalties to settle a lawsuit by the regulator. That’s just over half the $80 million the SEC reckons they lost from the stock’s gyrations after the tweet — and a mere sliver of the $12 billion in losses an expert witness for a class of Tesla investors calculated earlier this year in a separate class action trial.