A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter’s stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion. But it absolved him of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not “scheme” to mislead investors.
Money no longer talks. You need hard time for these societal meddlers.
That’s it, again?
JAIL TIME!
If I steal a bread to feed my hungry children I’ll go to jail, but this guy ficks around with billions and all he gets is a tiny slap on his fingers?
Oh No, point 2 % of his net worth
0.2%
literally less than a traffic ticket in terms of scale
I mean I dislike the guy as much as you, but almost all of his “wealth” is paper wealth. He may very well not be able to liquidate 2% of his wealth (fine with me).
He doesn’t have to liquidate shit, none of them do. They borrow against their holdings.
Point is that if I commit fraud or steal anything over 10 dollars I might go to jail
This guy lies steals and cheats by the billions and he gets a hug
Jail the motherfucker already
Reminds me of the same defense some people make in divorce court
Paper wealth and theoretical wealth, he will have to borrow that $2B using paper value as collateral.
…is Musk worth a trillion dollars now?
I mean, financially, yeah I think so. Which is ironic, since as a person he’s worth about as much as a large turd in a small bag.
He must pay a pittance, to be paid in 20 equal installments of one-twentieth of a pittance each.
Nothing ever happens though, so he’ll just take a loan and stop be beat as wealthy as he already was
Drop in a bucket. He should be fined of the money he paid to buy Twitter.
Cool, so when this reaches Appeals court (which is where it’s absolutely going next because they’ll definitely appeal it), that 2.1B$ fine will get knocked down to 10$ and a blowjob (for Elon).
But hey, the Washington Post or whatever can get a nice little headline out of it where they pretend billionaires face any sort of punishment in this Capitalist hellscape for 5 seconds so that’s nice.
To be clear, the punishment wasn’t him loosing 2B, he wouldn’t even notice the difference. The punishment was being told he was wrong by a jury of his “peers”.
I don’t understand why these courts charge a set fine for stuff like this. This is clearly an extremely unique case. The man is 20% shy of being a trillionaire.
What really needs to be done is they need to charge a percentage of his profits. Say 20 to 30%.
This idea needs to be fine tuned. The problem is that parasitic oligarchs don’t have a real income.
For those who don’t know, the parasite oligarchs take the vast amount of stock that they own and take it to a bank. The bank gives the parasite a loan with the stock as collateral. Right off the vat, the parasite gets to claim debt on their taxes. The parasite will then take the loan and use it to buy more stock or companies or anything that generates more wealth.
Loan gets paid off with the generated wealth. Due to generous tax loop holes put into place by politicians). The parasite gets to claim that they didn’t make any money and get a tax bill of zero and sometimes a refund.
This scheme is called “buy, borrow, die.” It’s legal. The stocks are typically not sold off, so capital gains taxes are avoided. Loans and debt are not taxable. It’s effectively profit with relatively low risk. The point is that the level of entry is extremely high. One must already have large amounts of money to qualify for these kinds of loans.
The problem, of course, is that if you start taxing debt, like people taking out loans, it’s not just going to be millionaires, as you called them “parasites,” paying those taxes. It will be everybody taking out a loan, including the poor and the middle class.
The proposed solution is to tax people based on net worth. If you’re worth above a certain amount, then you get taxed at a very high percentage.
With that being said, if that were the case and Elon Musk were taxed like this, he would only pay around $12–$13 billion out of the roughly $800 billion he already has. In essence, it would still be pocket change to him.
At this point, wealthy people not paying taxes has become a kind of game, who can pay the least.
What really needs to be done is they need to charge a percentage of his profits. Say 20 to 30%.
Lol. That’s not how the state serves capitalism. Fixed fines!!! Gotta put the burden the poor every time.
Antonin Scalea capped punative damages
Because that’s the law.
… and the billionaires draft the laws.
That is the price of new phone for him compared to us…
If the punishment is a fine, it’s only illegal for poor people.
The only war is class war.
Considering he’s made $400B since acquiring Twitter, this was just a minor cost of doing business.
And there is almost zero chance he actually pays this. If anything, it will be a fraction of the amount in 20 years after he exhausts appeals and pushes deadlines to the max.
This is an ATM fee
Best find a different ATM.
I don’t know, 0.5% isn’t a bad rate…
Hmm, maybe in the US. It is a very strange place after all.
Where do you live where ATM rates are less than .5%?
By the way, using an ATM from the same bank as your card doesn’t count, because that’s usually free.
I don’t think I’ve ever been charged a fee in Britain. You just use whatever machines are about.
Considering he’s made $400B since acquiring Twitter…
Serious question: How?
AFAIK, Twitter wasn’t terribly profitable before they sold to Musk. Then after he purchased it, the enshittification accelerated.
How on earth does this result in $400 Billions in profit?!?
Serious question: How?
He didn’t actually “make” any money. He just stole it from workers, humanity, the planet, etc.
He made $400B, not Twitter. That’s almost entirely from Tesla and other ventures, not Twitter.
Last I’ve been able to find Twitter was valued at $33B when xAI bought it. But that was clearly an overvalued sale. Just look at the valuation over time.
And that’s just raw valuation which is easily manipulated, not revenue or profit, which can be easily manipulated.
that is the worst chart
Ahh, okay. I understand. Thank you for the clarification.
It’s not real money, and Musk isn’t the richest person in truth, not by a long shot. This is theoretical money based on overpriced companies that are propped up by what I suspect are some rather shady practices and investors using it as a casino stock.
The money doesn’t have to be real for Elon to be able to use his stock as collateral for billion dollar loans. So he in fact has real money, that banks gave him, and that he will never pay back.
While true, a recession will change things.
It will only restrict his ability to get new loans, and make his collaterals worthless. But he probably spent most of the money they gave him, and like with twitter, he shifted the assets around in his network of companies, like a thimblerigger.
But that’s kind of like saying that inflation will make the rich poor, which is also not true.
When stocks crash, his loans that are backed by those stocks get margin called, and he will have to sell other stock. If the government didn’t bail him out, and they will so this is academic, although he will have to pay them bribes secretly obviously that goes without saying, he would see a cascading effect from a recession because his companies are all so overpriced.
Actually worst than imaginable if you delve deep the psychology of the rich is akin to tumour development. Never forget these rich fuckheads would bet over your misery like a game.
I could change the world for the better with this sum. Hell, even with the fee. Oh well, I’m sure it’s best that he has that money 🙄🤮.
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Not necessarily, the fine just needs to be a sufficient size.
Wake me when that happens.
Sanka, ya dead?
“Wake me” when anything at all happens…? The point is, they have the power.
Fines are not assessed that way.
Some are, but they often have maximum caps.
So for a UK speeding fine he’d get a £1000, but if it’s wasn’t capped it would be somewhere in the region of 340 million.
Your Speeding Offence Details
Speed Limit: 30 mph Recorded Speed: 35 mph Excess Speed: 5 mph Offence Band: A Road Type: Standard Road What This Means For You
Your offence falls into Band A, which carries a fine of 50% of your weekly income. Based on your weekly income of £640,000,000, your calculated fine is £320,000,000. This has been capped at the maximum of £1000 for standard road offences.
Why would any such fines be capped, unless the entire point is to effectively legalise crime for the ultra rich?
You sound surprised?
More chagrined than anything else. Having dual citizenship with US and UK is like having one foot in the grave and another foot in the toilet sometimes.
Finland has similar thing, but it is not capped. There’s a ton of 100 000+€ fines given around here. Obviously with Musk it would be a bit different, since the fine is based on actual income, not some imaginary monopoly money on the stock market.
That part is fixable though. Base the fine on valuation of assets.
…not assessed what way?
Disclaimer: I know you’re probably only trolling, but I’ll answer anyway:
…not assessed in a way to be of sufficient size to not just be considered a cost of doing business. In other words, pricey enough to take away the incentive to not only take away the profit but to also deal a significant blow to the wealth of the richest person on earth.
Believe it or not, everyone who you disagree with or misunderstand is not “trolling”.
There is no reason they couldn’t assess fines a different way…
Certainly the fines were sufficiently sized in the 90s era when they dropped the hammer on Microsoft.
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Percentage of profit accrued from the offense. They are static values.
Just because they’re currently assessed that way doesn’t mean they can’t be assessed a different way…
The class the class that writes laws have decided they don’t want that.
I don’t understand what your point is. No one is saying it’s going to happen tomorrow. The point is that fines themselves aren’t the problem. The problem is corruption and cronyism. Fines are totally effective when implemented properly.
For the rest of us, there would be a seizure of assets and a prison term.
Basically, and it’s not even like this is a corporation that has some level of money machine go burr, it’s straight up one man who did this and is responsible it should be cut and dry and he should be spending the next few decades in prison.
God bless Willie Nelson…
Loose change amount
That’s assuming they can even get him to pay it.
Ya for about 10% of that cost the lawyers will keep working hard to contest.
I don’t know how much he has liquid. The article says that “most” of his 814B is tied up in Tesla stock. Selling a couple of billion worth of stock isn’t trivial.
So that’s like me paying a $20 fine. GOOD JOB
Except he almost certainly won’t be paying anywhere near that amount, if anything.
Right, he’s just not gonna pay. It’s not like they’re gonna go get the money from his bank account. Can you imagine Elon Musk being garnished? Never gonna happen
Spoiler alert: he won’t pay or admit any wrongdoing.
admit any wrongdoing.
So, the Trump school of leadership.
This has really spread these days, including living in filter bubbles.
It should be % based of his income. Otherwise it’s not a punishment
Is this your first time in capitalism? That’s how every fine works. There are no punishments for the privileged.
The president is a pedophile who has been prosecuted for like 30 felonies. They’re not fining the creep at all. That’s reality.
This does not work because he will find a way to have 0 income (legally). I don’t know how we can make the billionaires pay, but we should tax the assets not the incomes.
A gun works pretty good, or maybe something like Logan’s run but instead of it being age based it’s wealth based.
How much as he made from his Twitter deal? He made it illegally, confiscate it all.
That’s the problem with Mr. musketeer he doesn’t actually show income. That’s why we’re always complaining about how billionaires don’t pay income tax.
It should be the amount he made from it + a fine. It’s how the middle class gets handled.
