from a pure broker perspective (meaning a true brokerage operation - one that doesn’t have its own proprietary positions, only a pass thru of customer —> street) here’s what i witnessed.
dividend shares were legally yours as of the Close of trading on Friday, Aug 28, 2020
if you held TSLA position (settled or unsettled) as of 8/28 you are entitled to the split proceeds.
that's when the Share Agent distributed the shares, it's all laid out in Tesla's filings). So you should have been able to trade your new shares on Monday morning.
the issuer, thus agent, didn’t release the split proceeds until wednesday 9/2,
on 9/2/20 around 11am eastern DTCC ‘credited’ their participants (those who held settled tsla shares as of 8/28 who were eligible for split) with the split proceeds.
meaning the shares from the split weren’t “settled” into each dtcc participant/firm until earliest 9/2
Your broker holds a pool of shares, in which your's are held. They didn't have enough to give you until they bought shares during the week after Tesla's $5B share offering.
yes the broker generally holds cust position in an omnibus acct, so the ‘street’ doesn’t know who each beneficial owner is. but it is your brokers duty to know this
they didn’t have shares to allocate until at least 9/2, when the issuer/agent/dtcc transaction processing took place
however, some brokers ‘front’ the proceeds immediately on ex date (8/31 in this case). for example, IBKR does this, and if you held shares there, i did/do, you’ll see the total post split position, available to trade, as of open market on ex date
some brokers, as you highlighted here at the time, unfortunately don’t do that. and that’s not good. in my prior post i theorized there were many causes for poor outcomes. some potentially malicious, some potentially of incompetence. there’s a difference under the hood…but to the customer it’s just an all out bad experience. it’s more difficult to prove the malicious part than it is to point out the incompetence part. the incompetence part usually consists off firms who have antiquated processes. but…using your POV, is the process lacking to hide the mailicious behavior, or is it lacking just because they aren’t technically proficient enough to provide better service. i don’t know 100%. i just know that my broker generally does the right thing when it comes to ‘corporate actions processing’ (divs, splits, tenders, mergers) although even they have their issues at times.