Musk settled a securities-fraud lawsuit the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought in 2018 over his tweets claiming that he had the funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share. The two sides carried on their dispute into last year, when they amended an earlier agreement to add specific topics that Musk isn’t supposed to tweet about without advance approval from a Tesla lawyer.
The topics include the company’s financial condition, potential mergers or acquisitions, production and sales numbers, new or proposed business lines, projections and forecasts that haven’t been previously published, and Musk’s purchase or sale of Tesla securities.
No comment
More than two hours after the tweets began, Tesla had not responded to requests for comment. Twitter declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had responded to an email asking whether he was joking or whether his tweet was vetted by saying, “No.”
Last month, a federal judge said Tesla and Musk must face a lawsuit by shareholders over the going-private tweet, including a claim that Musk intended to defraud them.
In April 2019 Musk tweeted, “My Twitter is pretty much complete nonsense at this point.”
“We view these Musk comments as tongue in cheek and it’s Elon being Elon. It’s certainty a headache for investors for him to venture into this area as his tweeting remains a hot button issue and the Street clearly is frustrated,” Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives said by email.
Tesla’s stock has surged in recent weeks, but is down since Wednesday after the company reported an unexpected quarterly profit, despite manufacturing interruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Musk’s latest tweets follow others this week. On Tesla’s quarterly conference call on Wednesday, he called sweeping U.S. stay-at-home restrictions to curtail the coronavirus outbreak “fascist”. Those restrictions have forced Tesla to shutter its flagship assembly plant in Fremont, Calif.
“Musk has recently expressed some strong and, at times, controversial, views on COVID-19 and some elements of the response to the crisis and we believe is attempting to use his broad following and visibility to bring attention to some economic factors that he believes may be overlooked,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a client note on Friday.
Musk’s iconoclastic stance has helped him attract over 33 million followers on Twitter and is seen as a marketing boon for Tesla.
Bloomberg and Reuters contributed to this report.
