Elon Musk being sued by SEC.

hindsight : often it's 20/20
the settlement - $20M against Tesla & Musk & loss of top dog status for 3yrs.
Not so horrible .... certainly better than either 'side' facing a lengthy trial. The SEC is FAR from being a neutral enforcement agency though. Like political parties - or the Banking industry - or big oil, etc ... big systems place self preservation over everything else.
Consider the SEC approved form of trading, called HTF's ( "High-frequency trading" - most are clueless about these).
High-Frequency Trading (HFT)

The system makes a boat load of money off millisecond transactions - & that money pays commissions -money to support the SEC approved HTF system, despite you & I not having that kind of access to its self protecting algorithm, that continually gets in & out w/out the kind of risk regular traders are exposed to.
The long & the short of it? The SEC creates the rules (via its lobby) that can interpret your words as deserving punishment, ah-la Musk .... & the SEC (via its lobby) creates rules legalizing unfair advantages - that the SEC makes money off of - & somehow is able to rationalize that as being perfectly fine.
Just maybe - the Musk verbal faux pas punishment was meted out to serve as a huge reminder - "don't mess with our system"
.

 

Yes, but if you go to the gear above the chart to the right and enable the afterhours feature the chart shows that the price jumped as soon as the news about the agreement between the SEC and Elon was released, long before open trading hours, and yes, shorts are generally astute and cover, but who knew the news that was coming, not the individual trader but the institutional trader, not the one hundred share trader but the 10,000 share trader.

How many margin calls went out after the 40 point drop, how many margin calls went out after the 45 point gain, this is not a stock for the timid.