SEC trial against Elon Musk reveals tragic flaw



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The consequences for Musk could be serious. The pursuit of the SEC seeks to force Musk to forego the gains stemming from the alleged violations, to face civil penalties and, more importantly, to be barred from acting as an officer or director of a listed company. stock Exchange. The last penalty may force Musk out of Tesla.

If the facts of the SEC filing are true, it is hard to imagine such reckless actions. Although Elon Musk thought when he went public to privately take Tesla, there might be some truth in that statement, but not the one he wanted: despite his ambition and his vision, Musk had not maybe not the public company experience in the first place.


Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are among the largest companies in the world. It is remarkable, but also a little disappointing. These companies manufacture phones, ship retail products and sell advertisements by extracting your personal data. It is not quite the future that anyone dreamed of living, let alone the one who conquers the world.

This is partly why Elon Musk has developed so many business leaders. Instead of making smartphones a little bigger, it made electric cars commercially viable. He has marketed reusable rockets and hopes to use them to send humans to the moon and Mars. He wants to dig tunnels under the cities to stop the traffic and transport supersonic goods in tubes above ground. These are the dreams that are worth dreaming about.

The way Musk dreams about it is what caused him problems with the SEC. With 22 million followers on Twitter, he has a direct line with his fans. In December 2016, Musk tweeted"Traffic drives me crazy. I'm going to build a tunnel boring machine and start digging … "Who does not feel like that? The difference is that Musk has actually kept his promise. "I will actually do it," he added a few hours later. The boring society, an underground transit game (still nascent) was the result. He currently plans to dig and operate electric sled tunnels in Los Angeles, Baltimore and Chicago.

These movements earned Musk a mythical character, a mixture of visionary inventor and magnate-mad. That's why he's often compared to Tony Stark, Iron Man's industrial alter-ego in Marvel's comics and films.

The only problem is that Tony Stark is a fictional character. The playboy inventor turned selfless philanthropist is a fantasy for newsprint and money screens, not a leadership strategy for executives. But if people start comparing you to a pop-culture hero who can steal, deceive death and save the world with miraculous machinery shaped by his own hand, which could not let her go to the head. ?

In fact, Musk's success has been a little more modest and much easier to manage and use than Tesla, let alone Stark Industries. The first Musk company, dotcom Zip2 local advertising, was sold to Compaq in 1999; Musk pocketed $ 22 million from the sale. His next project, PayPal, will finally be made public and sold to eBay in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion, of which Musk has raised $ 165 million. But he was not there for the IPO or the sale, having been ousted two years earlier for management disagreements. Peter Thiel took his place. SpaceX remains private. The Boring Company is a subsidiary of SpaceX. Thus, Tesla Musk's only experience is to lead and actively manage a public company.

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