Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted early Friday morning, “I think there is a> 0% chance that Tesla could be the largest company” and added, “probably in a few months” in the comments to followers.
Musk’s tweet advising on the timing of an expected rise in Tesla’s market cap has since been removed, but screenshots were widely shared on Twitter.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has clashed with Musk and Tesla over the CEO’s unfettered use of Twitter.
In the third quarter of 2018, Musk faced securities fraud allegations by the SEC after tweeting to his tens of millions of followers that he planned to take Tesla privately at $ 420 a share, and secured funding for it. Tesla’s stock price rose more than 6 percent that day.
Musk and Tesla entered into a settlement agreement in which the CEO and the company individually paid a $ 20 million fine and agreed that they would not be able to claim innocence, among other things.
However, the SEC sued him for violating that agreement after he tweeted about Tesla production numbers in early 2019, which they said was a violation of the terms.
As a condition of their revised settlement agreement, Tesla is required to approve all written communications, including tweets and other social media posts that Musk intends to share that contain material information about the company. The company has never publicly stated who is in the role popularly known as Elon Musk’s “twitter-sitter”.
More recently, a Tesla shareholder named Chase Gharrity filed a lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court over Musk’s continued use of Twitter, saying he cost shareholders billions of dollars in losses, for example when he tweeted in May 2020 that the stock price of Tesla was too high. in his opinion. Tesla shares fell 10 percent thereafter, representing a $ 13 billion drop in Tesla’s market value.
Musk has also commented on the price of cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, via tweets from his account, which currently has 49.7 million followers.
Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board decided and ordered Tesla to order Musk to remove previous tweets that the federal agency considered threatening employees. The company and Musk have time to comply with the injunction, but the offensive material has not yet been removed from Twitter.
The SEC and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.