analysis and produce a board briefing paper for tabling at the next meeting of the company’s board of directors. Board members gain a great deal of information about the decisions they need to make...

BUSINESS ETHICS
TOPIC 3: TESLA AND ELON MUSK’S TWEETS
Table of Contents
Introduction    3
Arguments    3
Recommendations    7
Conclusion    7
References    9

Introduction
Tesla is one of the well-known American electric vehicle companies and it is famous for its lifestyle transforming innovations. Tesla is located in Palo Alto, California and Mr Elon Musk is the co-founder, architect as well as CEO of this company. Elon Musk has always remained controversial with respect to his vision as well as ideas; however, current controversies are to be considered serious for both Mr Musk as well as Tesla. Being an independent individual, Mr Musk may be allowed to use social media according to personal opinion; however, being the CEO of a billion dollar company reflects the strings attached. Securities and Exchange Commission has accused musk’s tweets from 2019 as false and misleading, and currently the case has been filed in court. This argumentative paper will reflect both the sides that are defender and prosecution along with facts and statistics as well as some theories will be included. Further, in order to make the decision easier for the board members, a personal opinion regarding case along with recommendations will be provided.
Arguments
1. Jones and Ryan (1997) suggested that severity of act’s consequences, moral or immoral nature of act, degree of complicity along with extent of pressure to behave unethically are 4 major factors to be considered while judging any action as ethical or unethical. Further, determining the level of morality may be dependent upon the perceived level of responsibility; therefore, increasing responsibility must also reflect a significant increase in the morality of action, and ethical nature respectively. Bosse and Phillips (2016) inferred that ‘agency theory’ with respect to corporate governance could be applicable here. According to this theory, corporate executives always have a financial as well as moral duty to act in the best interests of shareholders or parties they may service. Mr Musk has been accused of posting such tweets in 2018 also, where he misguided other individuals as suggested by the report from SEC. However, Mr Musk counters this claim with the aspects of human rights, where he must be allowed to speak or tweet anything he may want or feel irrespective of his position or responsibility. SEC counter argues this claim with the aspect of chain reaction that is followed in corporate sector, and such tweets leads to major loss to the investors, who may get distracted due to such tweets.
2. Ethical decision-making can also be an impact of organisational force despite of individual opinions. Mr. Musk has been accused of such controversies before also; however, they did not lead to severe consequences. Moreover, he was warned by SEC in order not to tweet any organisational internal information without the approval from Tesla’s designated representatives. Jones and Ryan (1998) reflected that moral judgements could be concentrated in the understanding of ethical decision making as well as behaviour in organisation. Further, moral judgement and moral action can be different aspects, and through ‘moral approbation’, Ryan and Ciavarella (2002) have tried to provide a link between the prior presented concepts. It would be essential to consider that moral behaviour involves some kind of conflicts related to pressures, while moral judgements may include dilemmas, in which the conflict would be between two moral duties. Mr Musk has been found involved in such controversies as well as unethical tweets in prior history. One of the major roles that Tesla needs to perform is to maximize the profits of their stakeholders. Freeman’s Shareholder Theory presents this as a traditional view of organisational purpose because individuals buy shares in order to gain maximum profits (Miles, 2017). In other words, Tesla is required to create values for not only its shareholders but also for its stakeholders. However, such tweets from Mr Musk led to a steep fall in Tesla’s shares by 13% within several hours of posting them. Therefore, there was no indication of any moral behaviour from his part with respect to the investors, and market shares. Moreover, moral judgement here presented by SEC can be considered acceptable because the ethical dilemma here cannot only be based upon the impact on the investors; rather Tesla also was a part of this conflict.
3. SEC claims that Mr Musk did not pre approve his tweets, while Mr Musk considers as a vague claim because he possess the freedom to tweet...