TSLA, arguably the most headline-manipulated stock that ever was, has died $20 shy of the 407.86 rally target given here earlier despite a full-court press by the usual hypesters. Musk himself was one of them, starting the ball rolling with a sensational tweet earlier in the week about taking the company private at $420 a share. It was followed by a conveniently timed story about Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund taking a 5% stake in the company.  Overshadowing these factors, at least until Alzheimer’s-plagued ‘investors’ forget about it in a few more days/hours, was actual news that the SEC was looking into whether Musk’s tweets were strictly kosher. What are they going to do if not — put him in jail? Any fine would be a fraction of what is returned to the usual suspects when the stock next rallies. Whatever happens, I’ll be removing TSLA from the touts list for a while, since its engineered ups and downs have become an annoying distraction from the usual bizarreness of the stock market. ______ UPDATE (August 12, 5:08 p.m. EDT): There must have been a score of articles and think-pieces about Tesla out over the weekend. The gist of them was that it’s time to stick a fork in the stock, it is done. It’s not just the ridiculousness of Musk’s claim that the company will be profitable from now on; it’s the fact that he has strayed so far from his original goal of selling enough expensive cars to pay for the mass-production of cheaper ones. What drives corporate strategy these days, it would seem, is not ‘vision,’ but the ups and downs of Tesla shares.Why else would Musk throw a Hail Mary like last week’s announcement that he had lenders lined up for a buyout, and that the company would be profitable from now on? Neither claim passed the sniff test, and Musk will face trouble from the regulators because of this. He will also face increasing competition from Jaguar, Mercedes and other European manufacturers of high-performance cars that are moving into the electric-car space that TSLA had all by itself until recently.  Shorts who stood their ground when TSLA took a wild leap last week stand to be the big winners from this point forward, not Musk and his shareholders.