Elon Musk tweeted about Tesla as “largest firm”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted early Friday morning, “I think there’s a> 0% chance that Tesla could be the biggest company.”

Musk’s second tweet, indicating an expected increase in Tesla’s market capitalization at the time, has since been deleted, but screenshots became widespread on Twitter.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission previously had an argument with Musk and Tesla over the CEO’s unrestricted use of Twitter.

In the third quarter of 2018, Musk was charged with securities fraud by the SEC after he tweeted to his tens of millions of followers that he was planning to take Tesla private for $ 420 per share and had secured funding for it. Tesla’s share price rose more than 6% that day.

Musk and Tesla have reached a settlement agreement in which the CEO and the company each pay a fine of $ 20 million and agree, among other things, that they cannot plead innocence.

However, the SEC urged the court to despise him for violating that agreement after he tweeted about Tesla’s production numbers in early 2019. The agency said this was a violation of the rules.

As a condition of the revised Settlement Agreement, Tesla is required to approve all written communications, including tweets and other social media posts, that Musk wishes to share with material information about the company. Tesla has never publicly stated who is in the role of the muscle known in parlance as the “Twitter sitter”.

More recently, a Tesla shareholder named Chase Gharrity filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court over Musk’s continued use of Twitter. He said he cost shareholders billions in losses when, for example, he tweeted in May 2020 that Tesla’s share price was too high in his opinion. Thereafter, Tesla shares fell 10%, bringing Tesla’s market value down more than $ 13 billion.

Musk has also commented on the price of cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, via tweets from his account, which currently has 49.7 million followers.

On Thursday, the National Labor Relations Board ruled and ordered Tesla to instruct Musk to remove previous tweets that the federal agency deemed a threat to employees. The company and Musk have time to fulfill the order, but the offending material has not yet been removed from Twitter.

The SEC declined to comment on Elon Musk’s tweets, and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Correction: Musk only deleted the second tweet that provided timing guidance.