Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Tesla and market manipulation crime
by
Saint-loup
on 01/05/2021, 19:04:31 UTC
What Tesla did with bitcoin could be considered market manipulation, and that's a serious crime considered by the US government. The fact that the company invested $1.5B and make it public that bring a lot of investors to bitcoin, and after that, we see how bitcoin has a crazy jump in the prize, and now they sold the 10% when bitcoin was on its ATH.

As a reference, I will leave this link: https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes/market-manipulation-pump-and-dump-fraud

So, the question is, did tesla make market manipulation and you think the company will be charged for it?
According to your link from the FBI this criminal offense only applies to securities, then prosecuting Tesla would imply that Bitcoin is an asset belonging to the securities asset class. But AFAIK Bitcoin didn't pass the Howey test.

"Market manipulation fraud—commonly referred to as a “pump and dump”—creates artificial buying pressure for a targeted security, generally a low-trading volume issuer in the over-the-counter securities market largely controlled by the fraud perpetrators."