I said it is arguable (in the context of a fiduciary duty) that he was acting in the interests of the people to whom he owed a duty. Musks interests are aligned with TSLA owners (they own stock, he owns stock). He wants to protect Tesla/TSLA. Short sellers want to hurt it.

I didn't say I think it was "good".

Do you understand the difference?

I have no opinion about whether it was "good" or "bad" (whatever that means).

The work they are doing obviously increases the likelihood of a manned mission to Mars.

It's not contentious.

Already has a paying customer to go around the moon.

$TSLA:



$TSLAQ:

https://youtu.be/HkvYvk8vxuw

Someday you're going to have to explain how committing securities fraud which undermined trust in the company and his leadership and led to a giant selloff which the shorts profited billions from, and his investors suffered from, is "bad for the shorts" and "protects Tesla". Are you high or something?

I said it's arguable, in the long-run (which hasn't happened yet) that he acted consistently with his fiduciary duties. I also said there was collateral damage. Saying something is arguable does not = endorsing it or agreeing with it.

I guess English is not your first language. Sorry if I was condescending about that in previous posts.

The SEC didn't have a strong enough case to not settle, apparently.

As for shorts profiting billions off it, why was Mr. Left suing Musk if he profited billions?

AP NEWS:
https://www.apnews.com/edf981451fce41fc8556e89dcb55c09c

Looks like Left has now gone LONG $TSLA since:
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/11/1...the-stock.html

"Stock price, bro."
"It's all the short-sellers fault."

Net worth: USD $51.4 Billion

Larry Page probably recognizes Musk is lighting money on fire and basically doing R&D for rest of the world. If he thinks Musk/Tesla is a favorite to succeed, he could just invest in the company.

Basically, he’s saying Elon Musk is the charity most likely to change the world.

Seriously? Poor work culture at Tesla and Elon's erratic, egomaniacal management are well-documented at this point. See:
- Elon firing an engineer on the spot
- Tesla Factory Workers Are in Danger Because Elon Musk Hates the Color Yellow
- Elon Musk: extreme micro-manager
- Elon head-butting cars
- Low employee morale
etc

Elon's bold claims regarding autonomy are most definitely pipe dreams. A million robotaxis by next year, and any imminent full self-driving without LIDAR or advanced mapping, are 99.9% impossible.

No, it's not arguable at all. That single fraudulent tweet did a lot to damage to Elon's reputation, took away his ability to pump the stock and set the narrative via Twitter, and gave short sellers' arguments much more mainstream credibility.

Appealing to authority is not a valid argument, if you can even consider a random billionaire in an unrelated field authority.

All of your sources are 3rd-rate. Come back when you have credible data. I'll wait.

We'll see. He tends to be optimistic on timeframe but right on detail. He's right about LIDAR. You have no clue what you're talking about.

This is just your opinion.

Hardly a random billionaire?

Forefront of A.I. Google developed autonomous vehicles too.

He's better equipped than most to understand Musk's vision and the validity of his path to achieving it. He invests in his companies. They are friends. Both tech leaders.

Yes, it's validation. The best kind.

This is the source for that claim:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=MBItc_QAUUM

Which means this conversation, if it happened at all, happened in 2013 or earlier, which excludes some of the most erratic behavior we've ever seen from a tech billionaire and also most likely precedes Tesla's involvement in self-driving. Also, Steve Jurvetson who makes this claim is hardly a neutral observer (then a board member of both Tesla and SpaceX) and has a history of blindly backing the leaders of companies his VC firm invested in:

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/...mpany-but.html

My suspicion is that this was an off-hand comment mostly aimed at other tech billionaires and to a lesser extent charitable foundations that Larry Page doesn't think are doing anything that are important for humanity, as opposed to any particular endorsement about Elon Musk specifically.

Btw Steve Jurvetson also seems kind of erratic, though it's nice to see that he and Musk have each other's back:

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/11/168808...-party-apology

LOL.

Why did you omit Musk's clear denial?

But let's pretend for argument's sake there was an Eyes Wide Shut style gang bang. Who cares! Why is private/sex life relevant?

Why would you expect anything but erratic behavior from a tech billionaire?
That is the nature of the beast. You seem to have some baseless idea that it should all be smooth sailing. You just register a Delaware LLC and then bang you have an EV manufacturing company at full capacity. Perish the thought there might be turbulence along the way!

There are clearly a lot of downsides to that kind of lifestyle. But, on balance, the world is benefiting from the invention and deployment of better technologies. The lack of proportionality in judging the net cost/benefit of people like this existing is ridiculous.

True.

They are so far beyond the realm of being motivated by purely financial reasons. Once you have F you money, any additional business interest is likely to add complexity and pain to life, with diminishing returns. He could easily have retired to an island after PayPal and never worked again but instead he went max risk on and took on some really difficult engineering problems. Why?

I don't have an opinion about whether Musk is a good guy or not. His private life isn't that relevant, either.

My problem is with the TSLA short sellers.

They push false and self-serving narratives in the hope of profiting from the stock price declining. There are arguments for some systemic benefits from the existence of short selling (eg. price discovery) but that is invalidated if short sellers use dirty tactics like spreading misinformation. I've heard rumors of short sellers doing much worse stuff but I don't have first hand evidence to back it up so I'm not going there.

Price discovery is one thing. Actively trying to cause the price to decline by lying and emphasizing irrelevant details about someone's private life is another.

We need EVs asap. You can all gtfo and get rekt.

Narcissistic, delusions of grandeur, psychopathic tendencies.

I hope for your own sake you're trolling at this point. Kindly go **** up some other thread.

I hope for your sake you didn't lose your lunch money shorting TSLA.

But just because a free market allows you to do something, that doesn't mean you're not a phenom douche for doing it.

On the contrary, blatantly violating securities laws is absolutely not the nature of the beast. No one's talking about typical tech billionaire eccentricities, but rather the series of actions that could've easily led to much worse outcomes, had the SEC chosen to pursue the case more aggressively. I don't see any upside to that type of behavior - you can innovate without lying about funding being secured in tweets.

This is about Steve Jurvetson, who clearly doesn't mind cheerleading for a fraud like Theranos. Why wouldn't he try to make things sound good for Elon Musk? Whatever motivations he may have, VCs covering for friends and investments is nothing new.

Go on

You joined here to tell us this?

You were trying to use a Larry Page quote to demonstrate something. If you're trying to argue that it matters, we have to ask whether the source for the quote is credible and unbiased. Steve Jurvetson and Elon Musk being close friends that are in the same inappropriately work-related sex party may not affect your opinion of his credibility depending on your belief system (it certainly does for me, when combined with the fact that this and other inappropriate behavior was enough to get him fired, and likely divorced as well) but at the very least, it should affect your opinion of whether Jurvetson is biased.

There are no typical tech billionaire eccentricities. They are all weird outliers.

Had the SEC chosen to pursue the case more aggressively, it could also have resulted in a court dismissing the suit against Musk. The possibility of that happening obv weighed into the SEC's calculus when deciding to settle. So maybe the case wasn't as strong as you're suggesting!

Just because you don't see upside, that doesn't mean it wasn't a carefully thought out strategy, with upside. We don't know.

I'm not saying the guy is perfect. Mainly care about the spread of misinformation by short sellers who are hoping to influence the stock price for personal financial gain. If they succeed in doing that, how does the world benefit?

I already said I think Jurvetson is biased in favor of Musk. He'd likely say that himself.

I think it's pretty clear that Musk has a lot of support from people within the technology industry in California, including Page, Ellison, and others like them. Is it really a contentious proposition?

I do not believe Musk was involved in a sex party. If he was involved in harassment that would affect my opinion of his character and judgment.

This is a weird conspiracy theory and it's not really how markets work. Short-sellers don't short-sell random stocks, then run misinformation campaigns to get the stock price to drop to profit. This doesn't work and virtually no one with real money operates that way. Instead, short-sellers spend a lot of time researching which stocks both 1) are overpriced and 2) have a short-to-medium term reason for the overpricing to be corrected.

The truth is that those with a short position aren't any more incentivized to spread misinformation to suppress price than those with a long position to spread misinformation to pump up prices. Historically, the latter is far more common as a fraud mechanism and my general impression is that misinformation from TSLA owners massively outweighs misinformation from TSLA short-sellers. (fwiw, this is actually one of the reasons why I missed out on the recent price increase - I felt it was short-to-medium term depressed, but didn't want to be on the side of all that cheerleading and didn't have enough time to do the more detailed valuation analysis to support my feeling).

Also, the only party that was actually caught using dirty tactics like spreading misinformation is Elon Musk - there's no difference between what he did and what you're accusing short-sellers may possibly be doing, other than that 1) it's way more beyond the pale coming from the CEO of the company and 2) he actually was caught whereas your accusations are entirely hypothetical and without proof.

It's just disappointing to see intelligent people infected with bias and wasting their time and money betting against positive change in the world.