You just have a basic misunderstanding of the Legal function of companies, so your opinion is not well-formed. You are of course entitled to that opinion - just want to point out all the foundational, basic level stuff you have wrong when you form that opinion.
Thanks. You have AGAIN confirmed that my opinion is well-founded and correct. Keep on going, you're providing more and more evidence. Perhaps you just don't want to see what's really going on.
Here's a little known secret - most GCs have little to no legal function in a company. They operate FAR more on the business side of things. The head of each respective practice within the company (M&A, Employment, IP, Corporate, Securities, Litigation etc.) actually practice law and manage outside counsel. These people report up to the GC and the GC has the final call on larger issues.
Of course. So the M&A person is good. The IP person is completely incompetent. The securities person is inviting trouble, but probably will turn out well. The litigation person is incompetent. I can't speak at all to employment, which is almost invisible from outside, but what little we've seen from leaks doesn't look good to me. As for one other category... in 2013, they clearly didn't actually have anyone at all handling state licensing and regulations (or they were incompetent, I don't know which).
This is still a very bad track record in hiring by Todd Maron.
P.S. Permitting and contracts for superchargers is, according to a leak, done by an outside contractor, apparently with no involvement from Tesla's legal department -- apparently this change is what sped up supercharger installs.
And no, my description of the cost-benefit analysis conducted by in house counsel in no way condones lawbreaking. How can you ascribe such a black and white view of an area (legal) which is 98% gray area?
I know for a fact that they've broken the law in black-and-white areas. It does tend to color my view of other areas.
IR callbacks after earnings are not blatantly illegal and every company does them. Having private calls with bond people is not illegal and is an essential part of capital markets transactions. They made the determination that they didn't disclose any new material info, so no Reg FD violation.
If they think that "we're buying the Australia project batteries from Samsung" isn't material -- if they think "we weren't producing the first 50 prodution cars on a production BIW line, they were hand built" isn't material, uh... sure, this is sort of a grey area. You could claim that this wasn't material. But you'd be wrong.
If you have a different view that's an opinion, not a black and white fact that they are breaking the law.
And your $5000 claim to fix the Reg FD issue? Come on. They have to sell these bond issuances and get investors excited about the company in order to raise capital. It's absolutely essential to the survival of the company. The last thing Tesla needs is an overzealous legal team telling IR to stop selling the company to investors due to Reg FD fears. It's not cheap or easy to publish everything that's said to investors, either
Citation needed. They've actually given entire POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS to select groups of investors which they haven't published. It's trivial to publish those; it costs nothing at all. $0. It is cheap and it is easy. It does not require publishing any questions from the investors.
At the moment, I don't think anyone's inclined to complain.... simply because the investors getting these presentations are routinely leaking the information, so it ends up being public quickly anyway. Good for them.
But it's silly for Tesla to rely on that.
(plus the slippery slope problem). That could cost Tesla hundreds of millions in investment dollars.
Why? Because these investors need to feel, emotionally, like they're doing illegal insider trading, even if they're not really? I suppose that makes sense, if the investors are really emotionally driven.
I'm going to make a contrast: I've followed the actions of legal teams of other companies over the years.
IBM's is unconditionally stellar, always doing everything right. ExxonMobil is arguably evil but tactically extremely effective. Berkshire Hathaway is exceptionally good at all their legal work.
GE, 3M, and several railroad companies I've followed have mediocre but competent legal teams, who are effective most of the time.
Tesla is well below any of those by any external measure. Now, sure, you can say that's just because they're a startup. That's probably true. But they're getting bigger. It's about time they hired a competent in-house general counsel instead of using Elon's divorce lawyer.
