Goddamn, how much money does this
a$$hole have to do something like that? Like, what kind of accounting trickery is he doing to be able to do all that?
His own companies didn't have to put their own money into it either.
As I mentioned earlier it's the same scam that Enron ran. You have one publicly traded company which must tell people its financials. And then you have a bunch of private companies which dont release the data.
The private companies take a loan which obviously wont be disclosed. They use that loan to purchase from the public company. The public company gets to report profit. Stock price goes up for public company.
I think the unique loophole for Elon is the fact that in the Enron case, The corporation itself owned/controlled The private subsidiaries which was brazen fraud to shareholders. But in Elon's case, he's just an individual investor who owns the private companies. So there is a thin veneer of an arms reach transaction. Even more so since Elon technically is an extreme minority shareholder in Tesla, so he could plausibly argue in court that he is acting as a private citizen simply making a purchase, as opposed to representing tesla company interest when shifting balances.
Still shady as hell. I think if a different president other than trump was in charge of the FTC, IRS, and SEC then, they would probably have a case against Musk.
electrek.co
