Photo : "OnInnovation Interview: Elon Musk" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by OnInnovation
How billionaire and business owner Elon Musk’s ill-advised tweet resulted in a 20 million dollar lawsuit
Elon musk is a business tycoon with a net worth of 19.7 billion dollars. On August 7, 2018 he posted a tweet that would result in his being forced to step down as chairman of Tesla for three years and being sued for an excess of 20 million dollars.
With his goals being so reliant on prosperity and longevity, one would think that he takes extra care in preserving his companies’ success. However, his twitter post on August 7 that read,” Am considering taking Tesla private at $420 [per share in the stock market]. Funding secured” resulted in his being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for 20 million dollars.
The tweet and its consequences forced Musk to step down as chairman for three years after his tweet was deemed ”false and misleading” and having harmed investors who purchased Tesla stock in the period before accurate information was made known to the market. Moreover, his tweet having harmed investors in Tesla stock wasn’t purely theoretical, for Tesla stock dropped 14 percent by Friday, August 10, the same week the tweet was posted.
Who is Elon Musk?
Musk owns companies such as Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX, and is hailed by many as a wildly successful entrepreneur. He was once even noted as being “about as close as we have, circa 2015, to early industrial titans like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller” by Dwight Garner of the New York Times. He is also a documented philanthropist, with personal donations of 250,000 dollars to the Hurricane Maria relief effort in 2017 and 480,000 dollars to install ultraviolet water filtration systems to drinking fountains in Flint, Michigan in 2018.
Furthermore, Musk isn’t a stranger to expressing his success in his lofty business ventures. He makes these ventures apparent with the goals he sets for the future of his companies on their websites. His goal for SpaceX is one deeply rooted in the future of space travel : “to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.” On the other hand, Tesla’s goals here on Earth are “to accelerate the world’s transition to a sustainable energy future.”
Credits:
"OnInnovation Interview: Elon Musk" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by OnInnovation