[core-utility]

Devil's advocate, if Tesla camps on eBay listings for used Teslas for sale and places bids they have no intention of following through on for the sole purpose of driving others to bid higher and keeping the brand value high, this would be seen as manipulative by the end-buyers (though at the end of the day, they did ultimately bid and agree to the price they won at)

[JumpCrisscross]

> bids they have no intention of following through on

That is fraud.

This “group expected that, if it was the winning bidder, it would pay about $12,000 for the lease (based on its $18 per acre bid) out of its own budget.”

[qwertycrackers]

In that situation Tesla would find themselves ultimately compelled to perform on the bids, or pay some sort of damages. They could gum up the works with lawyers for a while but the final bill would get larger as the courts got fed up with their shenanigans.

In this situation the conservation group was fully prepared to make good on their bid.

[FireBeyond]

The conservation groups had every intention of following through and purchasing the land, they just didn't intend to exploit its resources.

[Jiro]

The state is basically selling the oil in the land on consignment. The state sells the oil rights, the group who buys the oil rights sells the oil, and they send a part of the profit back to the state (there's at least taxes, and maybe fees or royalties--I don't know the financial details of the oil industry).

If someone "buys the oil rights" and doesn't sell any oil, they're cheating the state.

[Hizonner]

You're reaching. Well, you're stretching like crazy, but not actually reaching anything.

Hypothetical taxes on unrealized (and possibly zero) profits are not in any way part of the transaction, and it's just bizarre to think of them that way.

There's no guarantee of royalties over and above the lease. You just dreamed that up to support your weird asspulled idea that there's some kind of fraud here. If they wanted guaranteed royalties, they could have written that in.

Furthermore, the state even had the advantage of writing the contract. If the state wants a condition on a lease, the state is perfectly capable of putting it in there (as it is now doing).

A sophisticated party (which a state is supposed to be), with experience in the business, made a public offer. Somebody took that offer with no modification, with every intention of performing on the contract, and with absolutely no attempt at falsification or even concealment of anything at all. The idea that that's somehow "fraud" is insane. Not only is it not legally fraud, but it's not colloquially fraud, either. It's nothing like fraud.

Which is probably why nobody actually involved was crazy enough to suggest that it was fraud.

If you make a deal you discover you don't like, that doesn't make it fraud.

[Edited to fix a false statement about royalties... I pasted in the wrong draft].

[JumpCrisscross]

> the group who buys the oil rights sells the oil, and they send a part of the profit back to the state

Source? (Not challenging you.)

> If someone "buys the oil rights" and doesn't sell any oil, they're cheating the state

I’d argue a better solution than thinning the buyer pool is setting a high minimum rebate, possibly one that only kicks in if the plot isn’t exploited.

Would also note that Wyoming’s revenue is from sales tax, mining tax and ticketing tourists. (Property tax is mostly minerals [1].)

[1] https://wyotax.org/research-education/wyoming-tax-faq/

[Jiro]

Google brings up a site showing that Wyoming does make money from taxing the oil: https://pawyo.org/facts-figures-2023/

[gus_massa]

Just increase the initial payment and decrese the part proportional to the production.

[nullc]

Shifts the risk that the land is not very productive onto the bidder, which I suspect is undesirable (except to the extent it incentivizes the bidder making a sincere effort).