Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Friday morning that “I think there’s a> 0% chance Tesla will be the biggest company” and added that “probably in a few months.” in responses to followers.
Musk’s second tweet offering guidance on the calendar for a projected increase in Tesla’s market capitalization 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 free use of Twitter.
In the third quarter of 2018, Musk faced SEC securities fraud charges after tweeting to his tens of millions of followers that he then planned to make Tesla private at $ 420 per share and that he had secured funding to do so. Tesla’s stock price jumped more than 6% that day.
Musk and Tesla reached a resolution agreement, with the CEO and company paying a $ 20 million fine and agreeing that they could not claim innocence, among other terms.
However, the SEC sued him for breaching this agreement after in early 2019 he tweeted about Tesla’s production numbers, which he said was a violation of the terms.
As a term of its revised settlement agreement, Tesla is required to approve all written communications, including tweets and other posts on social media, Musk intends to share content that contains material information about the company. The company has never publicly said who plays the role known, in general, 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 it cost shareholders billions of dollars in losses, for example, when he posted a tweet to May 2020 that the price of Tesla shares was too high. in his opinion. Shares of Tesla fell 10 percent after that, leading to a decline of more than $ 13 billion in Tesla’s market value.
Musk also commented on the price of the 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 direct Musk to remove tweets from the past that the federal agency considered threatening to employees. The company and Musk have time to fulfill the order, but the offensive material has not yet been removed from Twitter.
The SEC and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Correction: Musk only deleted the second tweet, which offered guidance on the weather.