According to Bloomberg, the SEC issued a subpoena to Tesla about Elon Musk's 2018 tweet about taking the company private.
The news, released on November 16, 2021, reignited a dispute between Musk and the SEC that has been simmering for more than four years. Musk posted an infamous tweet on August 7, 2018, that he claimed to have the funds to take Tesla private. (Tesla has been a public company since 2010.) ）
Musk said on Twitter that at $420 a share, he had "enough money" to close the deal, which was enough to buy shares of any shareholder who didn't want to stay in the company. During the afternoon stock trading hours, Musk continued to release relevant content, and the company's stock price rose in response.
Settle old accounts? Four years ago, they didn't deal with each other
In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission immediately launched an investigation and finally concluded that the privatization thing was simply a matter of no shadow. Although Musk has held several meetings with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, he "has never discussed with any source of funding the deal to take the business private at $420 per share, nor has he taken any steps to investigate the acquisition plan." Whether it is possible for all current investors to remain at Tesla "as a private company" through the "Special Purpose Fund" is inconclusive; the attitude of Tesla investors to supporting a potential privatization deal has not yet been confirmed. ”
A year later, Tesla and the SEC agreed that Musk's tweets should be "regulated" to prevent him from casually posting anything about the company. Under the settlement, tweets about the company's financial position, the number of sales or deliveries (including the estimates), and other specific subject matter must be pre-approved by the company's designated lawyer.
The pre-trial mechanism did not become the end of this crisis. In February 2019, the SEC asked a federal judge to use Musk's inaccurate tweet as a violation of the terms of the agreement. (Musk tweeted that Tesla will produce "about" 500,000 Model 3s this year, which appears to conflict with the company's official guidance on delivering a total of 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles in 2019.) ）
Musk claimed that the SEC was "seizing power in violation of the Constitution", and the SEC said that the CEOs of large companies did not count and "blatantly violated" the settlement agreement. Eventually, a federal judge ordered the two sides to sit down and discuss a definitive resolution.
The latest subpoena was just over a week after it was released, and the CEO began to demonize again. Musk released a poll for Twitter fans, asking if he should sell his 10% tesla stake if he "simply wants to pay more taxes." In the two trading days that followed, the automaker's stock price plunged 16 percent.
There's a story about why Musk says such yin-yang weird things, and Musk has bluntly criticized a proposal specifically for the wealthy that would impose a tax on unrealized gains from publicly traded assets. For example, if an asset appreciates, even if the person does not sell the asset, the person must pay taxes on the "unrealized gains." The proposal would essentially close the tax avoidance loopholes that billionaires often exploit. Previously, billionaires often postponed capital gains taxes indefinitely in order to pay less, and the postponement did not prevent the rich from using this wealth as collateral for the next step of borrowing.
On Nov. 16, Tesla disclosed the subpoena in its 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but did not elaborate on the nature of the agency's investigation, saying only that the agency "is seeking information about Tesla's compliance with the settlement agreement." ”
Tesla did not respond to Twitter comments; it has not responded to any questions from the media since the company dissolved its public relations department in 2019. A spokesman for the Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment.