SEC Wants Elon Musk Held in Contempt — and Maybe More

membership ticker

Right now is no time to come up short.

It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where the Big Lie is called a Big Lie, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we urgently need to raise about 400,000 by Thursday, June 30, to finish our fiscal year on track and give it everything we possibly can. Please help us get there with a donation if you can right now.

$1,150,000

$1,350,000

Right now is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we still need to raise upwards of 400,000 by June 30 to give it everything we can. Please help:

Xinhua via ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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.