Your (willful) bias against Tesla is showing.
In my interpretation the court will make a finding of the following facts:
- Did the tweets contain material information?
- If not => case closed in favor of Tesla, and Tesla might ask the court for more oversight of the SEC to not make harmful filings that hurt investors.
- If yes, did Elon intend to tweet material information?
- If yes => case closed in favor of the SEC, who might ask for further sanctions.
- If not, did Elon act willfully recklessly or negligently?
- If not => Tesla wins.
- If yes, the question is of whether the SEC has the right to restrain Elon's First Amendment protected speech even if he didn't intend to disclose material information:
- If yes => SEC wins.
- If not => Tesla wins.
As you can see, in this (simplified) decision tree of 5 nodes "intent" matters for
4 outcomes. There's three outcomes in favor of Tesla, and two outcomes in favor of the SEC - with the SEC having a bigger burden of findings of facts going in their favor.
So your point that intent doesn't matter is a
gross misrepresentation.
Somewhat ironically, in the
only outcome where Elon's intent is not examined, Tesla wins...
The open question to non-troll members of this forum is the probability of the various outcomes - and given the evidence so far IMO the "there was no material information" finding is the most probable one, followed by Tesla asking for potential findings and sanctions against the SEC for their frivolous, harmful filing.