Don’t Take Elon Musk So Seriously

The problem is that Elon Musk sometimes tweets things about Tesla Inc. that aren’t true. He once sent a tweet implying that he was no longer Tesla’s chief executive officer. “The messages stirred speculation over whether Musk had relinquished any roles,” etc. etc., but he hadn’t; it was just a thing he felt like tweeting. He once tweeted that the new Tesla Roadster would, um, fly: “Will use SpaceX cold gas thruster system with ultra high pressure air in a composite over-wrapped pressure vessel in place of the 2 rear seats.” I am genuinely uncertain how seriously that was meant. “Musk cautioned that the feature may not be street legal,” so probably not that seriously, but in the range between “100 percent deadpan Twitter joke” and “he currently commutes to the factory in a working prototype,” I would not want to speculate.

Most notably, last year Musk tweeted that he was thinking about taking Tesla private and had “funding secured” for that transaction. That one caused the stock to move dramatically, and led to a securities fraud lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission when it turned out to be completely untrue. Musk and Tesla settled that lawsuit, each agreeing to pay $20 million, and also agreeing to have a lawyer pre-clear Musk’s potentially material tweets about Tesla. And now Musk is back in court for tweeting claims about Tesla’s 2019 production numbers without pre-clearing them, and later having to correct them; the SEC is accusing him of violating that settlement and asking a judge to find him in contempt of court.