Bloomberg reports that:
Elon Musk provoked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the course of taking a victory lap on Twitter over Tesla Inc.’s surging share price.
The chief executive officer first taunted short sellers in a string of tweets, writing that the electric-car maker would “make fabulous short shorts in radiant red satin with gold trim.” That’s an apparent reference to jokes he’s repeatedly made about sending “short shorts” to investors who bet against Tesla’s shares, such as hedge fund manager David Einhorn.
Musk then tweeted a cryptic but profane play on the agency’s initials, prompting Ross Gerber, a fund manager who regularly engages with him on Twitter, to write back: “Dangerous.”
Herewith the tweet:
SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon’s
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 2, 2020
One begins to think that Musk is not playing with a full deck. Yes, he's a billionaire who has built (depending on how you count) three or four successful (-ish) businesses.
But the SEC notoriously lacks a sense of humor. As Mark Cuban discovered, being a billionaire does not insulate you from the SEC starting a weak enforcement case and just keep coming and coming. They can be beaten, as Cuban did, but at high cost.
Being Musk's security lawyer must require massive doses of Pepcid.