📉 A Musk Of Wrongdoing

The Securities and Exchange Commission is once again looking at a member of the Musk clan for a potentially illegal stock sale. Kimbal Musk, Elon's brother and a board member of Tesla, sold $108 million worth of the electric carmaker's stock a day before Elon made a tweet that sent share prices tumbling. The SEC is now investigating if Kimbal Musk violated insider trading rules. 

• “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?” Elon Musk asked his nearly 63 million Twitter followers on November 6, 2021. By the end of the year, Musk sold nearly 10%. 

• According to The Verge, a company's employees can avoid insider trading violations by using the program 10b5-1 to trade at predetermined times. However, Kimbal Musk did not seem to follow this program at the time of his November 5, 2021 trade.

Multiple Investigations

This is not the first time Elon Musk has found himself or a member of his family under investigation by the SEC. Most notably, the Tesla CEO was charged with civil securities fraud in 2018 after he tweeted that he was considering taking the company private and claimed that funding was secured. The share price tumbled as a result, and Musk ultimately settled the case with the SEC in 2019, says CNBC.

The Verdict

How many times can the world's richest person manipulate his company's stock price via Twitter and continue to claim that he is the victim of ​​“unrelenting investigation?” The precedence is being set here that a very wealthy CEO can simply avoid SEC violations to no consequence.