Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Biden THROWS DOWN against Musk in FINAL DAYS

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

President Biden’s SEC has just filed a new securities fraud suit against Elon Musk for manipulating the price of Twitter stock and causing the investing community $150 million in losses before he acquired the company. Michael Popok, using his Wall Street experience, explains that all of these Biden last-minute laws, rules, lawsuits, and policies, are important to Trump-proof democracy, and to force Trump to waste scarce time and political capital to publicly strike down these suits and policies, giving him less time and resources to implement his MAGA agenda. Remi: Save your smile and your bank account with Remi! Get up to 50% off your custom-fit mouth guard at https://shopremi.com/LEGALAF today! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Elon Musk for securities fraud and securities violations. I'm Michael Popak, you're on Legal AF on the Midas Dutch Network. Let me explain to you why it's important that Gary Gensler, the sheriff of Wall Street for Joe Biden, continues to do his job all the way through the inauguration. Let's break it down. I'll tell you about the suit and I'll tell you why, forget about build the wall, why Joe Biden's continuing to build in the remaining days of his administration, even through his

cabinet picks, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, they're building their insulator, their firewall to protect democracy with executive orders, with new lawsuits, with administrative procedures, because the more they do now, the more Donald Trump has to try to undo when he takes office. And there's a limited amount of time. I mean, if you do the curve of political capital, political will, and time, there's just only so many things that Donald Trump can do in the first day or a hundred days. And the more he has to try to undo what Joe Biden has done to protect democracy and the Securities and Exchange Commission has done to protect financial markets,

the less time he has on the clock to do what he wants to do, which is to advance his Project 2025 Heritage Foundation bought and paid for agenda. And so the new filing against Elon Musk for securities violations is important. Let me break it down for you. I'm going to use my Wall Street background to tell you about it as a lawyer who worked on Wall Street for a number of years. Let's get into it. What happened? What happened is the new lawsuit claims that Elon Musk defrauded, if you will, the market for $150 million because he did not disclose on time that he was acquiring millions and millions of shares of Twitter, then Twitter, before he bought it.

Why does that matter? The goal of regulators, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, for publicly traded companies like Twitter, ones who stock trades with the public, is to make sure that there's a level playing field in the investing community, right? That the big fat cat doesn't have an advantage through insider knowledge or information or

other transactions against the mom and pop investor. They already have a lot of advantages, trust me. But the advantage is about information. The goal is to have information be symmetrical and transparent so that if you're buying one share and Elon Musk is buying 10 million shares, you're on equal footing from an informational standpoint to make your decisions. Because if you knew, for instance,

that Elon Musk was buying up Twitter stock, you may not sell it as cheaply as you did into the market. And that's what Elon Musk is alleged to have done. Once you hit a 5% threshold, you acquire 5% or more of a publicly traded stock, you have that in your portfolio, it triggers a requirement. We call it the 13D or Reg 13D requirement that requires you to announce to the investing community through an SEC filing that you've acquired 5%. Why is that important?

Because once the market knows that you're a shark in the water and you're trying to acquire a large block of stock in a company, even though it's not controlling, that may indicate that you're trying to acquire the company, which means I may hold out for more money when I sell. If you don't disclose it, which is what the allegations are against Musk, he's able to buy up on the cheap from people who had no idea he was the one that was buying up the stock or what his acquisition or acquisitive goals were. And so for instance, I'll give you what happened.

He started buying the stock in the allegations of the complaint in January of 2022. By March of 2023, he had acquired 5%, but he did not disclose it, which allowed him to acquire almost another 5% of the stock, millions of shares from unsuspecting investors on the cheap because they didn't know, they knew it was Elon Musk ultimately,

but they didn't know that he was buying it to acquire because they didn't know how much he had because he didn't disclose it. And so the way the SEC calculated it, he took the market for $150 million. He bought his shares for $150 million less than if he had properly disclosed, which means that $150 million should be

in the hands of shareholders, not in the hands of Elon Musk getting a deal on buying up the stock of Twitter. He was 11 days late in filing that Reg 13D report. Doesn't sound like much, but in the fast-paced world of Wall Street, where he's acquiring millions and millions of shares during that time, he actually doubled his holdings in that period of time that he didn't disclose. So it wasn't by accident. He knows securities laws. It was on purpose because then

he started buying, buying, buying, buying, buying, and by its calculation he saved $150 million in doubling his stake. How do I know that? How does the SEC know that? Because as soon as he finally late filed his REG 13D on purpose, he had already acquired 10%, not just 5%, and the stock market responded, moving the stock price up 27%. So if you held your stock and you didn't sell it, you made 27% more on your money after Elon Musk announced it before. And when you run that across all of the buys, that's how you come up with $150 million that he basically defrauded the investing market over.

Now let me compare it to something. Walt Disney. Walt Disney, in a real estate transaction that's not regulated by a regulator like the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was able, like 75 years ago, to fly over central Florida in a crop duster and point out big swatches of agricultural land

that he wanted to acquire in and around Kissimmee, Florida, right? And buy it up through secret trusts and secret buying groups and secret sellers, straw men purchases, so nobody knew it was Walt Disney. Because if the farmers and the landowners knew it was Walt Disney, they already had Disney land in Anaheim, they might have said, whoa, wait a minute, we can get not a dollar an acre,

we can get $1,000 an acre. And Walt Disney didn't want that. So he acquired most of what became Disney World and Epcot Center on the cheap without the sellers knowing it was Walt Disney. Now later when he had to acquire more and his plans were known, he had to pay more for that. But that's all okay in a real estate arms length transaction because it's not regulated like the

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Thank you Remy for sponsoring this episode. Now, Elon Musk hates regulators and he's been doing a dance of death with the Securities and Exchange Commission the whole time he's owned public companies. They've sanctioned him, they've punished him, they've stopped them from using social media to gyrate on purpose his stock prices.

I mean, he used to post things on Twitter and on social media and just watch the stock go up. Like, I'm thinking about buying back all my stock at, you know, then he'd make a joke about smoking dope, smoking weed. At, oh, I don't know, at 4.30 a share. Oh my God, 4.30 a share, everybody started buying. Oh no, I'm not gonna do that. And that's illegal.

That is an illegal stock manipulation and where you're giving statements about what you're gonna buy that are false and the market relies on it. So he got sanctioned for that. Now we also know Elon Musk hates regulators around the world, inside the United States and outside. That's why, frankly, he's become ambassador chaos

for Donald Trump, and he's been trying to topple the governments of our allies, you know, of the UK, of Germany, of France, of Canada. Not because he cares about America, he wants to get rid of all those regulators that have been driving him crazy about all of his businesses. In the European Union, he hates the European Union,

and he hates American regulators. That was the biggest fear when Donald Trump brought Musk into the government is that Musk was gonna be single-handedly hand-picking regulators against him. He's got billions of dollars in government contracts, and he's the guy, he's the fox inside the chicken coop who's gonna be in charge of cutting government spending.

I assure you, come back here, we'll get the contracts through a freedom of information request during the four-year term. Elon Musk will triple, if not quadruple, the amount of his federal contracts for his companies while he is a federal officer. Guaranteed. He's already doubled his cryptocurrency and value in Tesla. You know, before he gave us $200 million plus to Donald Trump to buy an election,

his total net worth was about $250 billion. It's now pushing $500 billion just since November. That's why he gets up on stages and jumps up and down to like, cryptocurrency, yeah, because he owns billions in cryptocurrencies. He was doing that in the stock market for years. That's why he hates Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission head for now,

because he wants to regulate and has been regulating cryptocurrency. They don't want regulation in cryptocurrency. All of the incoming administration is completely tied in with the cryptocurrency community who gave billions of dollars to Donald Trump to get him elected. They have huge stakes in cryptocurrency. They own companies in cryptocurrency. His Commerce Secretary coming in, Howard Lutnick, tied to cryptocurrency. Donald Trump himself owns a cryptocurrency platform. Elon Musk, billions and billions of dollars in

cryptocurrency. They want to get rid of Gensler. Now why is the Securities and Exchange Commission filing with five days to go and five minutes left to go on the clock? Because it's important. Because the more that Joe Biden's administration does to Trump-proof democracy, the more that Donald Trump has to undo. The more Donald before more Joe Biden does, the more Donald Trump has to undo. There's only so much you can do with, you know, time is a limited resource. It's winding down right now. Thank you for devoting yours to me, into my analysis.

But in that graph that I talked about at the top of the hot take, right? Donald Trump has political capital. He's got scarce resources. He's got a leadership a leadership deficit People don't know what they're doing and he's got time and when you graph all that out He's got a limited amount of time to accomplish all of these crazy ideas and the more he has to expend Scarce political capital and be exposed to America about these chess moves in public that he's undoing what Biden did. All that wasted time is one moment less that he has to advance his own agenda.

Yeah, and certain things he can't even undo because of the way Joe Biden is completely tied off that knot. He's never gonna be able to undo it unless there's a court case and that wastes more time. If we learn anything from Donald Trump, make bad things happen more slowly. Bad things are happening, make them happen slower. So we're going to make that bad thing of Donald Trump happen slower by tying him up, by weighting

him down, by pinning him down with all of these lawsuits and people in his administration because it's right. And so that's why that's been done. I'm going to continue to follow everything that happens between now and Monday in the Biden administration world, including these lawsuits. Good on and kudos to Gary Gensler, Securities and Exchange Commission for bringing this suit. It'll probably be dismissed by the incoming Securities and Exchange Commission chair for

Donald Trump, who's already announced that he's a pro-cryptocurrency guy. We'll see what happens with this. But that again, Donald Trump gets exposed every time he gives a pardon, he gives a clemency, he takes away a lawsuit or has it dismissed, and he helps one of his buddies, one of his cronies. We see it. It's transparent. We can report on it and it builds currency

and it builds political capital for the Democrats. As Donald Trump's political capital is depleted, it moves over to the Democrats to try to make him a lame duck president as soon as 18 months from now. I know it seems insufferable in an interminable amount of time, but we'll get to that midterm stronger than we are right now because of these kind of filings and actions by the Biden administration at this moment. He is Biden. God bless his soul. He's setting us up for a successful midterm election,

and I want to call that out right here. You're on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. Thanks for being here. I got a new show Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. Eastern time here on the Midas Touch Network, thanks for being here. I got a new show Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. Eastern Time here on the Midas Touch Network. It's called PopePak Live. We got about a half a million people that are watching it every week. I appreciate you being there. We're building a beautiful new community,

PopePak Live, 8 p.m. Eastern Time, right here on the Midas Touch Network. And then we've got the OG podcast, Five Years in the Making, Legal AF, Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, also here on the Midas Touch Network. And then a brand new channel, because that intersection of law and politics is going to be the hottest of quarters as soon as Trump gets in office.

The amount of lawsuits that are going to be filed by pro-democracy groups and attorneys general around the country against Donald Trump and his worst instincts is going to blow my head off. That's why we formed a durable, reliable new channel with the Midas Touch Network called Legal AF. Come on over, hit that blue subscribe button and help us continue to grow that channel as well. So until my next reporting, I'm Michael Popock. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro-democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories,

the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at Legal AF MTN. That's at Legal AF MTN. Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet. Resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging a**hole and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get.

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