| Pump = buy a lot of something so the price goes up. Let's say $2 billion of it <wait for more people to buy it as a result of the price movement, and news, etc.> Dump = sell at the higher prices and match the increased demand This is whats being advocated by market analysts, and it would be considered "fine": https://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/21/03... If companies don't collude but do it in a sequence, then when does it become ok? As a different example, in 2014 employees alleged that Silicon Valley companies colluded to depress their wages, by acting like a cartel: https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon... But cartels can form without having to collude, merely by people acting in concert on a meme or belief (like HODL or SQUEEZE THE SQUOZE) and this seems fine! https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3798 |
McAfee did that all of that. Tesla/Musk did not (no false statements of fact or offloading at artificially inflated values).
Additionally, a "cartel" has a legal definition which requires deliberate coordination of activity (aka "collusion"). Independent activity in which everyone does the same thing without coordination is not a cartel, because the coordination aspect of it is key to the illegality of the act.