Unhappy shareholdersīacklash from Musk’s tweets has also come from shareholders. “It was wrong and insulting, and so I insulted him back,” Musk said. Musk testified in court that he had not meant to be literal in his tweet and that he was upset at the time at what he called “an unprovoked attack on what was a good-natured attempt to help the kids”. The Tesla executive later apologized and deleted the tweets after intense criticism from the public and his investors, but re-upped the baseless claims in another series of tweets about a month later and doubled down on them in an on-the-record email to a BuzzFeed reporter. Musk had grown angry after the caver ridiculed him over his plans to rescue a team of young footballers from a cave system in Thailand, baselessly calling Unsworth a “pedo guy” in a tweet to Musk’s then 22 million followers. Musk’s Twitter feuds brought him into a Los Angeles courtroom in 2019, where he faced trial for defamation relating to tweets and other statements he made about the British cave diver Vernon Unsworth. The frequent investigations and legal actions have rankled Musk, whose lawyer said in a legal filing in March that the SEC investigations constitute “outsized efforts calculated to chill exercise of First Amendment rights”. The Tesla CEO and his brother are now under investigation for insider trading relating to whether Musk told his brother in advance that he would tweet the poll. Musk again ran into SEC troubles when in 2021 he tweeted a poll about whether to sell his stock and proceeded to do just that. Musk, unsurprisingly, has not abided by those conditions, flippantly wiping $14bn off Tesla’s value in 2020 with a tweet stating that “Tesla stock price is too high”. Part of that 2018 settlement included a clause that Musk would have legal counsel approve tweets about Tesla in advance to ensure they do not contain market-moving news. (Musk maintains that the joke was “worth it”). The penalty marked a “warning for all those who make public pronouncements without regard for either the accuracy or impact of their words”. But the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concluded after investigation the tweets had no basis in fact and hurt investors, issuing two separate fines to Musk and Tesla of $20m. In August 2018, he posted that he had funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share – a joking reference to marijuana. Musk’s activity has in some cases cost him dearly. Here are some notable moments in Musk’s Twitter history. The executive has faced backlash – and in some case legal action – for his activity online. A prolific user, Musk has 84 million followers on his account – with whom he shares memes, news about his electric vehicle company, Tesla, and, like the majority of Twitter users, pithy commentary on his day-to-day life.īut Musk’s tweets are not all fun and games.
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