 Elon Musk is under trial today, yesterday and today, he testified yesterday, he's testifying today, in a trial brought against them by shareholders of Tesla who claim that a tweet he made in 2018, God, I closed the window where I had the tweet lined up for you guys so I could read you the exact tweet that Elon Musk sent, there it is, I got it. All right, so this is the tweet Elon Musk tweeted in 2018. All right, come on, open, there we go, all right. Quote, I'm considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share, funding secured. Now, at the time, Tesla stock was trading significantly below $420 per share, about 20% below. This is gonna be a 20% premium over the price. So again, I'm considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share, funding secured. Now, it turned out days later that he was not gonna take Tesla private and that the funding was not secured in the sense that he was still negotiating with the Saudis, the Saudis were gonna provide the money to buy Tesla and he was negotiating with them and it turned out that they backed off the deal to buy Tesla, help him buy Tesla at $420 per share. So the question is, did he mislead investors here? Did this cause investors to lose money? Did this tweet, tweet, remember, this was a tweet, that this tweet was, you know, caused people to buy Tesla in anticipation that the stock would go up to $420. Did this lead people to, I don't know, cover positions, change positions, did it change their behavior? And the answer to that is I think, yeah, it must have. I mean, this is real information. Remember at the time Elon Musk was both chairman of the board and the CEO of Tesla? So there's no question that a tweet like this, which provides new vital information, important information, significant information to your investment would change your behavior as an investor. But then the question is, okay, but was this, was this a, you know, just providing information to the investors and then it turned out the information didn't come true and tough or is this this constitute deception? And the deception, again, and a lot of this is gonna go down to the way the law is written, but deception I think has to do with partially with intent and partially with, did Elon Musk actually consider taking Tesla private or was he lying? And the second question was, was funding secured or at least was Elon Musk convinced that funding was secured? Now, this is a case that's already been decided by the SEC in a sense. The SEC decided that this was inappropriate communication by the CEO, it decided that this hurt investors that this was, you know, a violation of Elon Musk's fiduciary responsibility to Tesla shareholders and they have find, they have massively fine Tesla for this and they find Elon Musk. So all of that is already done. And you know, there, I think you would know my position, my position is, SEC shouldn't exist. This is not the purview of this SEC. The SEC should be looking for fraud. There's no reason to believe this is fraud. The SEC should be butting out of this. On the other hand, this lawsuit is completely appropriate. The lawsuit actually makes sense. This is the appropriate venue to, you know, get the facts and for a jury to decide whether this tweet was deceptive and whether Elon Musk knew it was deceptive and whether he had violated his fiduciary responsibility shareholders. This is the forum in which these kinds of issues should be discussed. Now, let me just say that if any CEO out there had said this about his company and it turned out not to be true, they would have been fined by the SEC. Indeed, my guess is that Elon Musk, because of the high profile that he has, probably got off easy from the SEC. I think another CEO would have been, you know, would have just been destroyed by something like this by the SEC. All right, so, but remember this is not, okay, put that aside. Okay, so this is Tesla 2018, I think this tweet was put out in 2018. So the real issue here is a legal issue. Did Elon Musk know what did he have reasonable reason to think when he said funding secured, did he have reason to think so? Now, Musk is saying, look, I actually did intend to take Tesla private or I was considering it. He doesn't say here is a done deal. And I actually thought the funding was secured. And he says, look, I had a handshake deal with the Saudis and then they backed down. I had talked to another people who said they would probably back the deal. I mean, my guess here is that funding secured is inaccurate and wrong and he shouldn't have said it because the funding wasn't secured. My guess is that legally funding secured means something. You have a contract, you have a real commitment. It's clear that he didn't. I think this is why one shouldn't communicate by tweet, important issues because tweets tend to be loose. I mean, but that's what he's testifying. He testified yesterday. He said, he actually thought he was doing the right thing. He said that he made this announcement in order to let all investors know because the next day there was gonna be a story in the Financial Times that suggested this is a possibility. By the way, if he just let the Financial Times article come out the next day, he would have spared himself all this legal trouble, all these fines. Anybody with a little sensibility with regard to the SEC, anybody with a little sensibility with regard to shareholders and shareholder lawsuits, you don't make these kind of public statements. You just don't. So this is a little bit of Elon Musk being impulsive. This is a little bit of Elon Musk, not talking to lawyers before making an announcement, which any other CEO would have done. Maybe this is inevitable. If you get Elon Musk as a CEO, he's gonna do things like that. He has testified in the court case that he believed he absolutely had the funding secured. And he also said that he was definitely considering taking Tesla private, but it was not committing to doing it. My guess is that he is gonna be exonerated here, but it really is hard to tell. I mean, it could be that they get somebody from the Saudi Investment Fund to come on and say, no, we never had a handshake deal. Elon Musk is lying, and then he gets found guilty. So this is gonna rely on, this is not some, I mean, this is not a crazy case. This is not some witch hunt. Although again, I reject the idea that the SEC should be doing this, but this is in the court, this makes complete sense. If you're gonna be a CEO in a modern corporation and you don't wanna destroy your company because it's in a heavily regulated business, if you wanna accept government money and by implication of accepted the SEC's role in regulating you and everything else and the framework of corporate law that exists today, you better have lawyers, you better have lawyers. And if you don't, then don't be surprised by what happens. So exactly what happens, we will see. I think Elon is presenting the defense basically, I thought it was a done deal, and I had every positive intention, and I did say consider, I think the burden of proof here is fairly high that he didn't. I think that you're gonna have to get somebody saying, no, we never promised anything. I don't know if the Saudis are gonna be testifying, but it will be interesting if they do and if they do what they say. But this is one of the usually class action lawsuits like this are completely nuts and completely devout of any merit. Here there's at least some merit. You can understand why people who may be bought on that assumption or sold in that assumption if they were holding options are pissed off and feel like they were manipulated. All right, that is in the news. We will see what happens to Elon Musk. I'll fill you in once there's a verdict when there's a decision. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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