[venning]

> the hundreds of $1000 spent just defending his short position through hiring former Herbalife people, funding legal campaigns, funding support groups

You are describing entirely legal actions. Sabotage and (this form of) industrial espionage are very much illegal. There's quite a difference there.

> a few $100k is pocket change for these guys

But a few billion dollars of market cap and a few years of jail time are the price of being found guilty of what Musk is insinuating.

That's not a small leap.

[Johnny555]

But a few billion dollars of market cap and a few years of jail time are the price of being found guilty of what Musk is insinuating.

If I stood to lose $100M, I wouldn't do the dirty work myself, I'd hire someone else to do it for whom taking that risk for $100K (or whatever) is worth the risk - that could be several years (tax-free) pay for some people.

I'd use several levels of anonymization or maybe redirection to try to keep my identity hidden (and I doubt I'd be successful, but it takes a certain level of arrogance to hire someone to sabotage a company because you bet against it and might be losing)

[elihu]

I expect that's how most industrial espionage happens; some company employs the services of some third party research firm to investigate a competitor's product and doesn't explicitly ask for anything illegal. Maybe that third party hires other contractors, and so on. The actionable information bubbles up through the chain, and the original company that funded the "research" has no idea where it came from. They might not even have had any intention of causing a crime to be committed, but ignorance is bliss.

It would be a lot harder to plausibly deny paying some third party for explicit sabotage; as far as I know, companies don't normally pay third parties to cause harm to a competitor for legitimate business reasons.

[madaxe_again]

Jail time? The SEC will just do the “this individual/corporation is important to the economy” thing and fine them some pocket change. The downside is far more limited than you might hope.

[smadge]

Can you provide examples of explicit corporate sabotage (e.g. criminally stopping production in a factory) being lightly punished by the SEC?

[madaxe_again]

No, because corporate sabotage is outside of their remit. They would only look at it within the realms of market manipulation and insider trading, for which the punishment is a) usually light and b) usually deflected onto a fall guy.

In terms of the actual espionage end of things, it’s covered by EEA 1996 - and the prosecutions there have always gone for the hand, not the head, and the fines have been in the thousands, not millions, of dollars range.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_19...

[venning]

You started by questioning jail time, then brought in the SEC. Now you're stating the SEC doesn't deal with industrial sabotage and talking about fines, which no one else mentioned.

As for actual jail time, here [1] is a single engineer in California (same jurisdiction as Tesla, presumably) that was sentenced to 15 years. Also, $28 million in fines, which is what he earned for his espionage. Another engineer got 2.5 years for the same incident [2]. And this was the very first instance of people being convicted under the Economic Espionage Act you mentioned. Further reading: [3].

I don't think the facts support your position.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-espionage-sentence-dup...

[2] https://www.law360.com/articles/571212/ex-dupont-engineer-ge...

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-individuals-and-company-f...