READ MORE ABOUT THIS AT THIS LINK: THE_CRIMES_AND_LIES_OF_ELON_MUSK
We have contacted FBI, DOJ, FTC, IG, SEC and all other law enforcement and regulatory agencies about this matter. Field agents have informed us that their bosses have ordered them to stone-wall this complaint, to avoid writing ‘302 reports’ (because Congress can see them) and to finger point the matter off to “other agencies” in order to avoid political embarrassment and administrative shame. Such obfuscation is illegal at a felony-level and at a Constitutional law level.We are now copying this letter to 1.) every member of Congress, 2.) every law enforcement and regulatory agency in the U.S.A. and EU, and over 5000 investigative journalists.
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AT THIS LINK: SHILL REPORTERS WHO TAKE BRIBES FROM THE ELON MUSK PR TEAM
Senior government officials defrauded Plaintiff in an energy industry stock market scam, and, in partnership with their Silicon Valley tech financiers, engaged in a RICO law violating organized criminal ‘enterprise’ and also ran over $30 million of Fusion GPS/Black Cube/Gawker-Gizmodo-Google attacks against Plaintiff, a competitor and whistle-blower.
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AT THIS LINK: HOW ELON MUSK GOT CORRUPT THE TRUE STORY ELON MUSK IS A CROOK AND SCAMMER
The attackers used government resources, agency staff and government funds. They sought to terminally harm Plaintiff in retaliation for competing with Defendants and for assisting police with investigations of Defendants. Herein, and via referenced Congressional and Inspector General investigations, we have provided proof of over 1000 instances of government officials running retaliation attacks and engaging in an organized pattern of criminal activity via an organized ‘enterprise’ as defined by RICO and anti-trust laws.
Plaintiff has personally known many of these politicians, their families and their Silicon Valley financiers since College. The Defendants invited Plaintiff into their criminal scheme but Plaintiff chose to assist law enforcement and public justice instead.
While the government is planning to give $450,000.00 to each illegal immigrant, (( https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/biden-administration-weighing-450k-a-person-compensation-to-migrant-families-separated-by-trump ); that same government is with-holding millions of dollars from Plaintiff, who saved the government billions of dollars. That same government hired Fusion GPS, Black Cube, Perkins Coie, Gawker, Gizmodo and other attack services to destroy Plaintiff according to federal investigators. Plaintiff demands compensation, back-owed monies and recovery of losses. Government agencies responsible for correcting the situation are engaging in cover-ups and stone-walling. Every public official who attacked Plaintiff: A.) held stock and assets in Plaintiff’s competitors, B.) was compensated by Plaintiff’s competitors, C.) was a member of organizations who paid news, internet and information services to manipulate their output for their own unjust gain, D.) knew that their malicious assertions were false and defamatory, and E.) and otherwise met the legal means test to qualify as violators of federal RICO laws, Human Rights laws, Civil Rights standards and related State and Federal Constitutional rights laws.
By rigging HUD, SSA, DOE, and other public benefits determinations, to harm the funding, payments, witness fees, informant fees, whistle-blower awards and stock market profits of adversaries, the Defendants engaged in felony crime. The purpose of this case is to cripple the whole crime organization via numerous charges, which shall be brought against multiple defendants, under multiple liability, which means that prosecutors will find the underlying elements of of these acts and then have conspiracy on top of it, and then each and every charge against the perpetrators is separate and runs consecutively .
For example when Elon Musk is charged with bribery and conspiracy that charge may have led to 10-15 years in prison in the old days, now under RICO, when found guilty of racketeering he can be fined up to $25,000 and and sentenced to 20 years in prison per each racketeering count.
RICO charges, as part of the charge set, will make these convictions easier. In many cases, the threat of a RICO indictment can force these defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, in part because the seizure of their assets would make it difficult to pay a defense attorney for a case this large. Racketeering and RICO-related crimes are grave and require skilled defense, that is prepared to face the government-assembled legal teams in federal court. Essentially, “it means the convicted would never see the light of day again, they are never getting out. “
Despite its harsh provisions, these RICO-related charges are easy to prove in court, as they focus on patterns of behavior as opposed to criminal acts. The government officials and their tech oligarch partners were audacious in publicly promoting their crimes and their above-the-law attitudes. RICO, here, also permits a private individual “damaged in his business or property” by a “racketeer” to file a civil suit. The government should, thus, join with Plaintiff in this case.
The plaintiff has proven the existence of an “enterprise“.
The defendant(s) are not the enterprise; in other words, the defendant(s) and the enterprise are not one and the same.
The defendant(s) meet the construct of four specified relationships:
1. the defendant(s) and the enterprise: either the defendant(s) invested the proceeds of the pattern of racketeering activity into the enterprise;
2. the defendant(s) acquired or maintained an interest in, or control of, the enterprise through the pattern of racketeering activity;
3. the defendant(s) conducted or participated in the affairs of the enterprise “through” the pattern of racketeering activity ;
4. the defendant(s) conspired to do all of the above crimes.
The enterprise, herein, is the ‘prize,’ ‘instrument,’ ‘victim,’ or ‘perpetrator’ of the racketeers. A civil RICO action for this matter should be filed in state AND federal court.
We intend that both the criminal and civil components will allow the recovery of treble damages (damages in triple the amount of actual/compensatory damages) for Plaintiff.
Our evidence has focused on patterns of behavior AND criminal acts.
We seek multiple liability (charges brought against multiple defendants, which means if prosecutors now find the underlying elements of of these acts, you have conspiracy on top of it)
Each and every charge against defendants is separate and runs consecutively. Admissible hearsay evidence is offered in this case. Associative evidence is allowed ( guilt by association meaning if a defendant profited off the crimes of an organization even if he was not directly involved with the crime himself he shall still be charged as a co-conspirator and go all the way up the chain of command).
This case structure will incentivize the operatives (soldati) at the corrupt law firms, CPA’s, lobbyists and media outlets to flip, or roll-over, on the bosses.
This case structure allows both the government and Plaintiff to engage in substantial asset seizure (over $900B). The owners of the racketeering shell corporations, real estate scams and trusts are well-known to often abscond with the assets. An injunction and/or performance bond ensures that there is something to seize in the event of a guilty verdict. In addition, the racketeers must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of “racketeering activity.” Over 1000 false-front shells, trusts, dark money and PAC assets are known to be held by the defendants.
While your bosses may be embarrassed, or find this matter “politically awkward”, no citizen in America cares. Any boss who delays or obfuscates this case further should consider that they will, by such action, legally define themselves as a member of the above defined “enterprise” and will be criminally referred to FBI for prosecution.
There is no time like TODAY, to get this matter moving.
We have provided the details in a 1000+ page complaint as well as a list of public officials we have reported to who have failed to take action, been non-responsive and who have operated a cover-up of this matter.Your PROMPT attention in resolving this matter will be much appreciated.
An Inconvenient Truth: How Tesla Became a Trillion-Dollar Company Through Corruption, Bribery And Cronyism
Astonishing story about the rise of green technologies using political payola
By Ilya Pestov and The Justice Alliance
After the news that Hertz decided to buy 100 000 Tesla cars for more than $4 billion, Tesla capitalization has already increased almost by $200 billion. I am not talking about the market irrationality anymore, but I feel a bit curious. Hertz has recently emerged from bankruptcy and has not received any wholesale discount from Musk. How and why is Hertz going to buy such expensive cars? The answer is simple — with taxpayers’ money.
Apparently, the White House has recently passed the Budget Reconciliation Bill, which would cost $1.75 trillion for US citizens. There are plenty of benefits for the so-called ‘clean energy’ in it, particularly, 30% of tax deductions for ‘qualified commercial electric vehicles’. It means that after buying Tesla cars Hertz will receive $1.26 billion of tax cashback. In fact, there are also some benefits for the installing of electric vehicle charging stations. Hertz has already announced plans to make thousands of charging stations.
Lithium, Cobalt and rare earth mines are owned by Kleiner Perkins, Goldman Sachs and Department of Energy/White House insiders. That is what power’s Elon Musk’s cars. Many say that Tesla was just a front for invading foreign nations for their lithium batter mines (which are operated with child labor).
It is important to mention that common people have also an access to tax benefits that the public pays for with their April income taxes and the compensation limits are increased from $7500 to $12 500. As an example, instead of paying $15 000 income tax you may buy Tesla Model S and pay just $2500. It is like a pretty bonus from Tesla or a good discount on electric vehicles. Seems to be a good motivation to refuse internal-combustion engines, doesn’t it?
Moreover, Tesla also gets ZEV credits and other benefits for manufacturing its products. That way, the US government restructures the automotive market literally by hand and picks the winners and losers. Do you know what I find the most interesting in this story? The fact that the new bill was published on October, 28th but Hertz announced buying of Tesla cars on October, 25th. As you can understand, the decision was made much earlier.
You may already know that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who gave Tesla their money, and his Silicon Valley friends at McKinsey Consulting, who provided the staff for the Department of Energy, were all in the pocket of Kleiner Perkins, where Al Gore works. Chu has now been replaced by an actress named Jennifer, who laughs at any suggestion that her job involves protecting America by keeping gas prices low and who owns the very companies that she is giving government funds to.
Now I would like to tell you about one very interesting character in the US establishment named Al Gore. This is the former US Vice President under Clinton, the presidential candidate in 2000 and the Nobel Peace Prize winner for the film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) about global warming.
His film and book have actually became the foundation for modern climate policy and the public demand for renewable energy sources. One should notice keep in mind that along with the awareness of internal concern for the ecology Al Gore was one of the first who realized the commercial potential in projects devoted to the protection of the environment.
Two years before ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Al Gore together with Goldman Sachs Chief Asset Manager David Blood has run a new investment company Generation Investment Management. As a result, they both defined terms sustainable investing and ESG.
The former presidential candidate, as we could see, was very good at technology and finance. In 2007, he was suddenly invited to become a partner in Kleiner Perkins — one of the oldest and largest venture funds of Silicone Valley. John Doerr, one of Kleiner Perkins chief partners, joined the advisory board of Generation Investment Management.
J. Doerr, as Al Gore, stood for the innovations in clean energy to struggle with climate change. On the TED conference in 2007, he quoted his daughter “your generation created this problem, you better fix it”. That reminds me on Greta Thunberg’s words which would be told later. So that J. Doerr and Al Gore had a similar vision of the future and the month after mentioned partners’ rotation Kleiner Perkins fund invested into Silver Spring Networks. Biden’s daughter, Ashley, left her hand-written diary for journalists to find where she reveals the same thoughts (in addition to her naked shower play with Joe Biden)
By great coincidence, this deal happened a year before the US Department of Energy had announced a $3.4 billion grant program for smart grid developers. In fact, $560 million of this amount was spent to utilities serviced by Silver Spring Networks, which works exactly with smart grids. 6 years later Silver Spring Networks successfully entered an IPO.
Luck literally pursued Kleiner Perkins. In 2008, the fund invested tens of millions dollars in a start-up hybrid cars manufacturer Fisker Automotive. After that, in September 2009, the company received a low-interest $529 million loan under the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) direct loan program from the same US Department of Energy.
Congress passed ATVM in 2007 after a drop in sales in the big three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler). The volume of the borrowed capital was $25 billion. The goal of the program was to help the US auto industry to reduce fuel costs because Americans were tend to choose more fuel-efficient Japanese cars. That is, the problem devoted not to ecology issues, but much more to fuel saving.
Again, ATVM passed in 2007, but the allocation of funds began only 2 years later on a competitive basis. In February 2009, 8 months before the government loan to Fisker Automotive, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins became a member of the Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Council. The funny thing is that Fisker did not even have manufacturing facilities in the USA and the assembly of their Karma models took place in Finland.
The Obama-Biden administration appointed a venture capitalist from Kleiner Perkins as a member of an economic advisory board. They also signed a government loan for help American automotive industry to a company (without any manufacturing capacity in the United States) that Kleiner Perkins has invested in.
That trick was obviously noticed by the public. Some companies have sued the Department of Energy, Mitt Romney even called on Congress to open an investigation into the loan to Fisker Automotive, pointing out that its investors included Al Gore, who sponsored Obama’s presidential campaign. Nevertheless, somehow all those worries dwindled away as federal cover-ups went into full swing.
Fisker’s plans to start the manufacture at a closed GM plant in Delaware at the expense of a government loan, which GM itself did not receive, deserved special attention. These plans caused some questions among local residents, and then current Vice President Joe Biden, who served as Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, assured people that the budget money for Fisker would be paid off, and the company will eventually return “billions-billions” dollars to everyone.
Running ahead, the budget money didn’t return to taxpayers because Fisker went bankrupt in 2013. From the bankruptcy documents, which fell into the journalists’ hands only 7 years later, it turned out that Hunter Biden (Joe Biden’s son) was an investor of Fisker. However, this fact also faded into oblivion without preventing Biden from gaining 58.8% of the votes in Delaware during the 2020 presidential election.
Let us turn back to Tesla. Only $8.4 billion were allocated from the $25 billion program of help to the American auto industry. Only 5 companies received money, although 108 applications were received. Almost $6 billion went to Ford with a democratically oriented management, $1.5 billion were given to Nissan, about half billion — to Fisker and Tesla and, finally, $50 million came to a less known VPG company.
Surprisingly, the credit limit has not been exhausted, large manufacturers like General Motors or Chrysler did not receive money, but two unprofitable startups from California, selling several hundred cars each, did. We already know the main lobbyists of Fisker — they are Al Gore and John Doerr, who invested in Fisker through Kleiner Perkins. But were they acquainted with Elon Musk? A brief search immediately gave a positive answer to that question.
In 2013, Al Gore, while talking about his new Tesla S in an interview to Yahoo Finance, called Elon Musk his friend. More than that, his son Al Gore III has been in charge of Policy & Business Development at Tesla since 2015. After learning that I immediately went to have a look at the Generation Investment Management profile on CB Insights. It turned out that the Gore fund had invested in Musk’s SolarCity in 2011 and Gore III worked there as a Policy Officer.
Then in 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity. An unprofitable service company that didn’t even produce solar panels was taken over for a suspiciously large amount of money. Recently it turned out that Elon Musk has faced a $9.4 billion fine for this deal, although the final court decision had not been made yet. It is important that after the takeover in 2018, Al Gore became suddenly nominated for the post of chairman of the Tesla board of directors.
Al Gore rejected that offer but I did not doubt more about his close connection with Tesla. At the same time, I was interested in their possible contacts before receiving the lobbied state subsidies of 2009. That’s why I decided to change the angle and check whether Tesla has a relationship with Kleiner Perkins. Then it turned out that Elon Musk had been friends with John Doerr for a very long time.
In 2006, when Tesla looked for money in round С, Kleiner Perkins fund offered $50 million, while VantagePoint offered $70 million. Despite the huge difference in bids, Musk wanted to strike a deal with Kleiner Perkins but on the condition that John Doerr would sit on the board of directors. Unfortunately, J. Doerr had many other obligations and was forced to refuse. That’s why Musk chose VantagePoint, as he told in an interview.
I went on and learned that the vice president of Tesla in 2006–2017 was Diarmuid O’Connell. As I remember, he was responsible for national security issues under former Secretary of State Colin Powell. He also spoke about Iraq chemical weapons and showed test tube to legitimize the military invasion of Iraq at the UN in 2003.
I wondered how he appeared in that story. However, I didn’t have to look for an answer for a long time, so let us meet Colin Powell, a member of the advisory board of Kleiner Perkins, a strategic partner of the fund in 2005.
There was no direct investment from the fund in the company, nevertheless it seems that there was another strong connection between Kleiner Perkins and Tesla. Is Al Gore really not a government subsidy beneficiary for Tesla? My confirmation bias did not allow this thought to get along in my head. Searching for keywords, I came across publications in Yahoo Finance and Insider Monkey. The articles mentioned Gore’s earlier investment in Tesla.
Keeping in mind that the journalists could simply make a mistake, I began to study which funds were invested in Tesla at earlier stages and whether Al Gore was involved. Finally, I came across an interview with the managing partner of Capricorn Investment Group on the blog of the Japanese financial holding Nomura. He said that Capricorn financed the filming of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ movie.
Capricorn was founded by Jeffrey Skoll, the former eBay president and billionaire. The fund invested in Tesla together with SpaceX at early stages. Mr Gore brought in $35 million! Can you imagine? “That’s a big wad of cash for someone who reported barely $2 million in assets in 2000, when his job as vice president came to an end”, as the New York Times wrote in 2008.
As a result, Al Gore was the direct beneficiary of providing state loans under the ATVM program for Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors, in which he owned shares through venture funds Kleiner Perkins and Capricorn Investment Group.
When I proved it, I wanted to learn more about Al Gore’s bio. It has been revealed that after losing the election, in 2001, he became a vice president of Metropolitan West Financial — a company with more than $65 billion in assets under management. The company was managed by former heads of Drexel Burnham Lambert. That was a bankrupt investment bank, which history was very similar to Lehman Brothers.
The same year Mr Gore also joined the Google Advisory Board, in which he invested together with Kleiner Perkins in 1999. Probably that was the time when he met John Doerr. Then, in 2003, the former US presidential candidate became a member of Apple’s board of directors. In addition, the founders of Google were also early investors in Tesla.
It is clear that Albert Gore had many connections in political and financial communities. In 2006, he started a charitable organization The Alliance for Climate Protection. The company launched a $300 million (sic!) ad campaign to mobilize Americans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately. As a result, an “inconvenient truth” was told to everyone.
In 2009, Gore appeared before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to support Obama’s economic recovery plan. Then the government had passed the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included an $80 billion stimulus package to promote green energy initiatives. Newspapers called the bill the “biggest energy bill in history”.
The person who owns stakes in Tesla and Fisker first knocks out government loans and then pushes a law according to which manufacturers of electric vehicles should pay fewer taxes, and buyers of electric vehicles should receive tax deductions. Can you imagine?
Surely, Al Gore was not the only one who acted in this process. In 2006, Nick Pritzker, the brother of Hyatt founder, invested in Tesla. His niece Penny Pritzker became the 38th US Secretary of Commerce in Barack Obama’s cabinet, and his nephew was the Governor of Illinois. In general, Pritzker is one of the richest families in the US.
Among of early investors in Tesla there is Steve Westley, a politician and businessman. He has already joined the company’s board of directors in 2007. More than that, during the 2008 presidential election, Westley acted as a co-chairman of California’s Obama for America campaign. Currently, he is a member of the US Department of Energy advisory board.
Al Gore, John Doerr, Nick Pritzker, Steve Westley, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Larry Page — all of them were so-called donors and beneficiaries to the Obama campaign. I mentioned only the names from the public access. Let me remind that these people are only mentioned in the context of the Tesla story while the whole green initiative and the Recovery and Reinvestment Act affects a much larger number of companies and investors.
The rapid development of electric vehicle companies is taking place in a distorted market environment. Their commercial success is mainly driven by government incentives unavailable for ICV cars manufacturers.
The US government is literally restructuring the auto market by hand in order to make one guy: Elon Musk, massively rich.. In that case the active discussions about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions could probably be nothing more than a part of a program to reallocate money in the US establishment since Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and The Feinstein family are the true owners of the stock profits from Elon Musk.
However, the question remains whether this is really a good thing, because there is no full consensus in the scientific community regarding the general belief in the environmental friendliness of electric vehicles and the beneficiaries are always the same 50 people associated with Nancy Pelosi.
Elon Musk’s not-so-secret weapon: An army of Twitter bots touting Tesla
Russ Mitchell
In early November 2013, the news wasn’t looking great for Tesla. A series of reports had documented instances of Tesla Model S sedans catching on fire, causing the electric carmaker’s share price to tumble.
Then, on the evening of Nov. 7, within a span of 75 minutes, eight automated Twitter accounts came to life and began publishing positive sentiments about Tesla. Over the next seven years, they would post more than 30,000 such tweets.
With more than 500 million tweets sent per day across the network, that output represents a drop in the ocean. But preliminary research from David A. Kirsch, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, concludes that activity of this sort by so-called bots has played a significant part in the “stock of the future” narrative that has propelled Tesla’s market value to altitudes loftier than any traditional financial analysis could justify.
In a market in love with “meme stocks,” sexy narrative is proving far more profitable than financial analysis, said Kirsch, co-author of “Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation.”
“The Tesla narrative is extraordinarily powerful,” Kirsch said. Despite the company’s several brushes with bankruptcy, the vision of a planet-saving, world-dominating business enterprise has enabled Chief Executive Elon Musk “to keep selling stock to the public to keep it fueled. At a certain point, it does become self-fulfilling.”
Whether Twitter bots are being deliberately programmed to manipulate stock trading is among the questions that Kirsch and his research assistant, Moshen Chowdhury, are trying to answer.
Their inquiry comes as Musk has been signaling an intention to use his wealth and gigantic Twitter following to influence the platform’s future direction and policies. After buying nearly 10% of Twitter last month, Musk announced that he’d be joining the board, but Twitter revealed Monday that he’d changed his mind for unspecified reasons. Musk is a Twitter phenomenon, constantly posting tweets for his 80 million followers that range from standard to outrageous to juvenile to profane.
He settled fraud charges with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 for allegedly duping investors into believing he had a deal to take Tesla private when he didn’t. He’s now trying to nullify that agreement in the courts.
A Twitter bot is a fake account, programmed to scour the social media site for specific posts or news content — Musk’s posts, for example — and respond with relevant, preprogrammed tweets: “Tremendous long term growth prospects” or “Why Tesla stock is rallying today” or “Tesla’s Delivery Miss Was ‘Meaningless.’” The bots can also be programmed to send nasty or threatening messages to company critics.
Kirsch and Chowdhury collected and reviewed Tesla-related tweets from 2010, when the company went public, to the end of 2020.
Over that period, Tesla lost an accumulated $5.7 billion, even as its stock soared and Musk became one of the richest humans on the planet; his net worth is estimated at $275 billion. Operational results can’t justify anything close to the company’s $1-trillion market value, based on any kind of traditional stock-pricing metric.
Emails to Tesla and a Twitter message to Musk seeking comment for this story went unanswered.
Using a software program called Botometer that social media researchers use to distinguish bot accounts from human accounts, the pair found that a fifth of the volume of tweets about Tesla were bot-generated. That’s not out of line with giants like Amazon and Apple, but their bots tended to push the stock market and tech stocks in general, with those companies as leaders, but not focus on any particular narrative about the companies.
While any direct link between bot tweets and stock prices has yet to be determined, the researchers found enough “smoke” to keep their project going.
Over the 10-year study period, of about 1.4 million tweets from the top 400 accounts posting to the “cashtag” $TSLA, 10% were produced by bots. Of 157,000 tweets posted to the hashtag #TSLA, 23% were from bots, the research showed.
Kirsch and Chowdhury tracked 186 Tesla-related bot accounts and found that after each was launched, the company’s stock appreciated more than 2%. (They looked at the average stock return for the week previous to the bot’s creation and for the week following.) While Tesla’s market value has increased over the years, the price has seen dramatic ups and downs. The periods around bot creation showed sharp increases, but outside those windows, trading was far more volatile, Chowdhury said.
“This isn’t a causal relationship, but it does raise questions,” Kirsch said, about why there’s a correlation that does not appear to be random. “We’re trying to understand the mechanism. It can’t be just a bunch of tweets that push the stock. People have to notice them, interpret them and act on them.”
The researchers are looking at the timing of the tweets and options activity in the overnight stock market, among other factors. One big unknown: whether the bots are the work of entities with a direct financial interest in Tesla.
Twitter bots have been created on behalf of other companies, the researchers found, but the content tends to be what they called “generic” marketing messages.
Whatever the effect on stock prices, Kirsch said, the bot campaign represents a new form of corporate content distribution or, as he calls it, “computerized computational propaganda.”
“This computational content may have buffered the Tesla narrative from an emergent group of critics, relieved downward pressure on the Tesla stock price and amplified pro-Tesla sentiment from the time of the firm’s IPO in June 2010 to the end of 2020,” reads a paper that the researchers plan to present at the International Electric Vehicle Symposium in June in Oslo.
The paper calls Musk “a singular figure on Twitter,” with his 80 million followers. “It’s not clear if this strategy could be replicated by other firms,” the authors write.
If so, the legal and ethical questions will become more salient. Should firms that use bots have to disclose their use to the SEC or conform with lobbying disclosure rules?
Those are questions Kirsch believes regulators will need to consider as other firms see how Musk and Tesla have benefited from their bot following.
“It matters who stands in the public square and has a big megaphone they’re holding, and the juice they’re able to amplify their statements with,” he said.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
