<story><title>Tesla Faces U.S. Criminal Probe Over Musk Statements</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-18/tesla-faces-u-s-criminal-probe-over-musk-statements</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lgeorget</author><text>I guess I&amp;#x27;m a bit off-topic but sometimes I really fail to understand the USA culture. You can make the most outrageous and racist comments because of &amp;quot;freedom of expression&amp;quot; but making speculators lose their shit with a couple of tweets is a &amp;quot;textbook crime&amp;quot; for which you should &amp;quot;go to jail&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>atonse</author><text>As sad as this makes me (because I want Tesla to be wildly successful), I have to agree. This is textbook and brazen stock manipulation, a flat out crime.</text></item><item><author>harryh</author><text>There are a lot of things to respect about Musk.&lt;p&gt;But he lied on twitter in a direct effort to cause financial harm to people shorting Tesla stock. You can&amp;#x27;t do that. He should go to jail.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>Although that is definitely an oversimplification (there are plenty of limitations to freedom of expression), why is your description particularly odd or difficult to understand? If an executive at a public company makes misleading public statements  with the intention to cause certain transactions (which may or may not be the case here), that&amp;#x27;s a pretty clear financial crime with clear victims. I don&amp;#x27;t see why jail time would be out of the question.&lt;p&gt;If you just make &amp;quot;outrageous&amp;quot; comments on twitter, why is it weird that &amp;quot;USA culture&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#x27;t generally prescribe jail time? I&amp;#x27;m from the USA, granted, but that sure seems like a reasonable protection of freedom of expression.&lt;p&gt;Racist comments are of course a trickier example, but I think it&amp;#x27;s perfectly reasonable for there to be a legal distinction between (protected) tasteless&amp;#x2F;offensive&amp;#x2F;insensitive statements about race&amp;#x2F;ethnicity and (not protected) statements that defame or incite violence.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tesla Faces U.S. Criminal Probe Over Musk Statements</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-18/tesla-faces-u-s-criminal-probe-over-musk-statements</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lgeorget</author><text>I guess I&amp;#x27;m a bit off-topic but sometimes I really fail to understand the USA culture. You can make the most outrageous and racist comments because of &amp;quot;freedom of expression&amp;quot; but making speculators lose their shit with a couple of tweets is a &amp;quot;textbook crime&amp;quot; for which you should &amp;quot;go to jail&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>atonse</author><text>As sad as this makes me (because I want Tesla to be wildly successful), I have to agree. This is textbook and brazen stock manipulation, a flat out crime.</text></item><item><author>harryh</author><text>There are a lot of things to respect about Musk.&lt;p&gt;But he lied on twitter in a direct effort to cause financial harm to people shorting Tesla stock. You can&amp;#x27;t do that. He should go to jail.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rootusrootus</author><text>The first amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but it has always had limits applied.  Fraud is not considered a valid exercise of free speech.</text></comment>