Matt Levine, Columnist

Who Can Say What California Means?

Also stock buybacks, terror bonds and Citgo.

February 27, 2019 at 4:58 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Imagine, as I do every day, being the Tesla Inc. “Designated Securities Counsel” whose job is to review Elon Musk’s draft tweets before he sends them out. (Bloomberg News calls this unnamed but undoubtedly accomplished lawyer “Musk’s Mystery Twitter Sitter.”) The first problem is of course that Musk doesn’t actually let the Designated Securities Counsel review the tweets before they go out, so right there the job is basically impossible. But even if he did share his drafts, it would not be easy. So for instance:

Musk tweeted “Some Tesla news” at 3:21 a.m. Eastern Time last night, so the second problem is that if you are the Twitter sitter you are working a lot of late nights. But the third problem is, even if Musk does show you his drafts in advance, during business hours, what do you make of them? Like: