> What part of "I have secured funding for taking Tesla private" was accurate and honest?
We don't know. He might have chosen to not disclose his discussions with other people.
> If he had not secured funding, how was his statement not deceptive?
He might have meant it in earnest. For fraud, surely he must have had the intention to profit from it personally at the expense of shareholders?
> And if you sold shares based on his statement,
Who would have done that and with what reasoning? Why would you sell for a lower price if you believed you'd get $420 very soon? That's a silly notion.
> a fraudulent pyramid scheme
A pyramid scheme is by definition a system where most (i.e. the last) investors get screwed, i.e. they don't make a profit.
> Except he actually did consider it and negotiated with investors. How is it fraught when you investigate a business opportunity?
Even if what said was 'truthful', he would have filed is intentions with the SEC to begin with but didn't. Actions speak louder than words and he still hasn't done anything to take Tesla private after paying for the charges.
> So many salty shorts itt.
Shorted what? Yeah I shorted NKLA [0], and told everyone to do so in the open and laughed all the way to the bank.
> I invested in Tesla's IPO with some chump change (mostly because I was a lot poorer then). $4000 turned into $200k+, at which point I sold half. So perhaps you are right but I'm $100k cash / $100k paper richer for being "wrong".
Ponzi schemes will often lead to people making money in the short-to-mid term. Not saying that Tesla is an outright Ponzi scheme but I do think that their stock is overinflated and following something Ponzi-adjacent. I can find plenty of examples of charismatic people that develop large followings that really don't deserve it, and then everything eventually tanks.
>it would be a mistake to assume that others in the same position would do the same because you feel they should. They don't and they probably won't.
I don't assume that.
>people that do not disclose their positions are not decent human beings.
Decent human beings is a bit broad, but I do think they're engaging in an unethical action, yes.
>Holding HN to some kind of imaginary standard when it comes to discussing public companies is both unproductive and likely will not illuminate but will merely give the illusion that if someone does not disclose their position that they don't have any. After all, who will verify what anybody writes?
I don't expect to illuminate it and I don't think the community would fall for the illusion you think that it would any more than it already does. Perhaps the root disagreement comes down to doing what you can when you can even if the effect is only a small one, which is kind of what I'm doing here.
>full disclosure: I hold about 2 billion worth of Tesla stock...
I don't know whether you do or not (EDIT: do or do not disclose that is, for clarification) but I think if you post about Tesla without disclosing that holding, that's unethical. Whether it's against the rules or not.
>MAYBE you can feel some emotion for the investors whose money was essentially stolen, by a scam artist?
Please explain what the scam was, and how money was forcefully or fraudulent taken from the investors. Was the scam the public knowledge of a CEO using private jets to smoke weed and vacation with company money and speaking in cultish phrases? Was it the lack of cash flow? Was it the obvious lack of any moat?
There's a pretty good case that they were trying to do this to Tesla. We heard all these claims about how nobody was really buying their cars and so on, which turned out to be bullocks, but were being made at a time when they were in a precarious financing situation.
But the general problem with asking for examples is that nobody has the inside information necessary to verify them. I can point to any company that went bankrupt following negative media coverage at the behest of short sellers, but how is anybody supposed to prove whether or not they would have survived in the alternative?
> Judging by many of these comments, I'm not sure some people here understand the mechanics of how selling shares short actually works. It does not, defacto, destroy any value in the company.
Are you sure you know how short selling works? Short sellers borrow shares in the company and then sell them, which temporarily increases the supply of shares on the market and suppresses the price. If the company at that point issues new shares or wants to borrow money against the value of their stock, it costs them money, i.e. reduces access to capital or requires them to pay higher interest rates, which negatively impacts the business.
And that's just the result of the actual short selling, not including the reputational harm caused by false allegations (or over-hyped technically true allegations), which can reduce demand from not only investors but the business's customers.
>It sounds like "the banks," who would be in an even more privileged position to know if the $420 offer was legitimately secured
Speculation. What's not speculation however is that the company suffered material harm as a byproduct of malicious prosecution.
If I, as a government employee, open a public investigation into someone whom I know to be innocent and cause that entity harm I have incurred liability. The SEC knew Elon had the funding, they used weasel words to imply he did not. The SEC would have lost in court. _All_ contracts have contingencies, this was no different. Saying that because a contingency existed the funds were "not secure" is horsecrap.
> why else would Chuck have done it in this thread?
Because he's a decent human being. But that doesn't mean that people that do not disclose their positions are not decent human beings. And that's where we really differ, Chuck went over and beyond the call of duty here, it would be a mistake to assume that others in the same position would do the same because you feel they should. They don't and they probably won't.
Holding HN to some kind of imaginary standard when it comes to discussing public companies is both unproductive and likely will not illuminate but will merely give the illusion that if someone does not disclose their position that they don't have any. After all, who will verify what anybody writes?
full disclosure: I hold about 2 billion worth of Tesla stock...
>2. It went as described in the article - for the capital I allocated to Didact, I beat the market (SPY) by ~20% since inception.
This seems extremely hard to believe. You should be running a multi-billion $ Quant fund if this is the case. The idea that you would try to push this as a newsletter rather than just taking investor money and becoming a billionaire literally makes the story seem farcical.
No, nor have I reported Deepak Chopra or Amway or Gwyneth Paltrow. There are blatant scams all around us. A lack of interest from the feds doesn't mean much.
Besides, the SEC has enough on their plate when it comes to Tesla.
>So it does say what he thinks it says.
Doctor Oz is, by all accounts, a brilliant surgeon. Would you follow the medical advice on his show?
> I think it was all a ploy to pump the stock and sell more cars.
I wonder why a CEO lying to pump his stock is not yet illegal. Otherwise what's topping Sundar to come out and say
"Google will have AGI in 6 months, buy Alphabet stonks wink-wink".
> And it worked.
I know, because a couple of my friends put all their saving in TSLA stocks during the pandemic. And all it cost Elon was his credibility and being exposed as a clueless liar to the point if he'd say the sky is blue, I'd double check.
>Was this just a trick to get headlines from journalists who don't know how to interpret the files on the website?
You're discussing a Twitter post by the same guy who knowingly committed securities fraud ("funding secured.") in order to protect the share price of his company.
One of the greatest grifters in history.
Do you expect him to be honest and upfront in his PR dealings?
> It's insane he could have cashed out as a billionaire
hah no. The billionaire claim was bull used to promote himself and his businesses. I wouldn't be surprised if a detailed accounting showed that he has never had a positive liquidation value for FTX and Alameda at any point in time.
It's a common problem people have in reasoning about fraudsters-- there is a tendency to only peel back one layer of fraud and get caught because the fraud continues all the way down. :)
> The involvement of the banks was always the confusing part of that deal. Really made me lose respect for their judgement.
Agreed, but to be fair the bank transactions were for debt rather than equity, so they will still end up ahead unless he really does drive the company to bankruptcy. That’s a real possibility, but they’re in better shape than the equity investors who have in one public case[1] already written down the investment 47%.
> What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird.
If you look at the investors, with few exceptions, they were _not_ sophisticated VC firms with experience in the area. Most of them were, for want of a better classification, elderly rich people. This should probably, in retrospect, have been a huge red flag.
>She stated that she's come to believe the speculation of company value is nothing but a pyramid scheme divorced from any actual value of said company.
How so? What's the evidence for this, especially when you consider that the company's stock price goes up/down depending on their quarterly performance?
> There's no payoff for a pyramid scheme. They just pile money somewhere, without actually doing anything with it.
Agreed, the stock market is not a pyramid scheme. I only used pyramid scheme as an example for a scammer’s rhetoric. However it still looks like a scam to me (albeit not as bad of a scam as the average pyramid scheme is).
Having worked for a company which increased in share prices exponentially while I worked there on minimum wage, I cannot agree with the statement that the shareholder/worker relationship made “everyone who participated richer”. The average worker certainly didn’t. The only people that got richer were the shareholders (and perhaps some contractors). I experienced this exponential growth as a scam. The value of my work was being extracted into rich people’s pockets.
See the stock market might look to an outsider as an arrangement where everyone benefits, but to a worker it always looks like a scam. Especially when you consider an alternate arrangement where the shareholder returns control of the profits of the company back to the workers after they’ve made up the money they gave originally to the business plus some fees and interest. The very fact that the shareholders keep control even after they’ve made their fare share of the profits, multiple times over, is what makes this look like a scam in the eyes of the workers.
> I replied, “I don’t think our investors would accept this.” (We’d been hoping to raise new money at a $150M valuation, and had floated this to potential new investors. There’d been some interest, though no serious takers.)
> And then, my terrible mistake, a moment that I’ve regretted ever since: “Actually, I know we’re worth three times as much.” /14
I don't see how it's reasonable at all to pounce on this as a lie if you mean it in the sense of having a strong belief and say this when asked to clarify.
We don't know. He might have chosen to not disclose his discussions with other people.
> If he had not secured funding, how was his statement not deceptive?
He might have meant it in earnest. For fraud, surely he must have had the intention to profit from it personally at the expense of shareholders?
> And if you sold shares based on his statement,
Who would have done that and with what reasoning? Why would you sell for a lower price if you believed you'd get $420 very soon? That's a silly notion.
> a fraudulent pyramid scheme
A pyramid scheme is by definition a system where most (i.e. the last) investors get screwed, i.e. they don't make a profit.
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