SEC Wants Elon Musk Held in Contempt — and Maybe More

Xinhua via ZUMA

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How big an idiot is Elon Musk?

Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk violated an agreement that settled fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission by tweeting material information about his electric car company without prior review, and should be held in contempt, the federal regulatory agency said Monday in a court filing. The potential repercussions are big: It’s possible that Musk could be unseated as CEO and banned from serving as an officer of a publicly traded company.

….Last September, Musk, Tesla and the SEC struck a deal to settle fraud charges over a series of Aug. 7 tweets….Under the deal, Musk agreed to have the company monitor his public comments about Tesla before putting them out on Twitter or elsewhere. He also agreed to personally pay a $20-million fine, give up his chairman’s seat at Tesla and bring two new independent directors onto the electric-car maker’s board.

The only way Musk’s behavior makes sense is if he’s tired of Tesla and wants to be gloriously kicked out instead of quitting on his own. If the SEC kicks him out, after all, he could gripe and bitch about it for the rest of life while maintaining no responsibility for the decline of the company. I dunno. Maybe that seems like an attractive option at this point. It’s hard to account for doing something so obviously stupid any other way.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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