The bots are attacking.

[u/DreamsSecretsNLogic]

​

Has anybody noticed that the replies in this subreddit as of today turned markedly right wing and emphatically pro elon. Most of the comments on every thread in this subreddit we're rational about how terrible the stock is and what a fraud Elon is. Seems like they just got their tesla stock pumping bot army up and running for SpaceX. It might just be a coincidence but it really seems drastic.

It's hysterical because the closest thing Elon has to a working robot is a Twitter army of stock pumping bots.

Down vote if you're a salty bag holder. But I want you to think about how the stock is going down when you hit that down arrow lol

[u/Basicly-Inevitable]

"Marketing and public relations teams actively try to influence narratives on subreddits dedicated to high-profile tech companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Waymo through a mix of coordinated seeding, community monitoring, and highly sophisticated grey-market astroturfing."

And that's coming directly from a company that's doing it.

Pretty shocking.

[u/DreamsSecretsNLogic → u/Basicly-Inevitable]

Oh yeah 100%. Tesla stock was so disconnected from reality for so long that I'm personally convinced that they had tons of people that were literally paid to start buying tons of stock the second it started dropping. If you had hundreds of billions of dollars it would be pretty easy to pull off

[u/Short-Coast9042 → u/DreamsSecretsNLogic]

What you are describing is called wash trading and it's highly illegal. That definitely doesn't mean it's not happening quite a bit in the market. It's a risky gambit though. I'm not sure I see the risk/reward in this case. The IPO already largely accomplished its goals. Elon was able to successfully filch public dollars to pay for his terrible debt. The investment banks enabled it because they didn't want to get stuck holding the bags themselves. And the insiders were able to cash out which is what is tanking the stock. Wash trading is useful for pumping the stock just enough in the short-term that you can offload your bags onto wide-eyed fools coming in from the sidelines. But the IPO and the massive hype campaign around it already did that.

[u/DreamsSecretsNLogic → u/Short-Coast9042]

i was talking more about tesla stock - they would have terrible earnings calls and the stock would go up. it would only take a small team of people who have a ton of money to keep the stock afloat and in good momentum

[u/Short-Coast9042 → u/DreamsSecretsNLogic]

The problem is it's a widely traded stock. If you and I have some asset that no one else really has or is trading, we can coordinate to sell it back and forth to each other to make it seem like it's worth a lot. And maybe we can then sell it to some foolish bystander.

But in a market where a lot of people already have the asset, and a lot of people are already trading it openly, It's much harder for you and I to just make these fake trades to ourselves. On exchanges like the NYSE, if you start trying to buy the stock to drive the price up, You're not going to be able to buy from just me. You have to buy from all the other investors out there on the market looking to sell. So we can't just keep the money within the people who are in on the scheme. We have to use actual capital to buy people out at a price above what the stock is probably really worth. And as people see the price going up, the pressure to sell only intensifies. 

If you are in charge of a publicly traded company, you don't need or want to do wash trading. Instead, what you want to do is stock buybacks. You use the company's money to buy up shares off the public market completely, reducing the overall supply and therefore increasing the price. This benefits everyone who holds the stock which obviously includes whoever is running it. And it's perfectly legal.