I don't buy the stock market argument. People open short positions worth more than $100K every day, especially against companies like Tesla. There would be nothing suspicious about a few such trades.

But really, my point is that pulling off a sophisticated exploit involving major celebrities, politicians and CEOs, social engineering/bribery, internal access at a top company etc. doesn't really seem worth the risk if at the end it nets you $100K.

But you can't make those trades anonymously. So everyone who even remotely profited from the stock movement gets put on the suspect list, and the FBI just went from needing to investigate literally anyone to maybe a few hundred people at most. The FBI is more than capable of going through a list like that and narrowing it down quickly.

> People open short positions worth more than $100K every day

Yes, but you'd need to open one worth $1m to make $100k on a 10% move. $1m is still not "much" in the grand scheme of things, but it's still significant.

Not with put options, no. You can make 1000% return on these, especially when you control the exact moment the tweets will be published.

You can use variety of instruments to get a lot more then 10%

If you have a million to play with you could probably get something on the order of 10-20million or a lot more I guess depending on time you have to prepare

> There would be nothing suspicious about a few such trades.

Not on it's own, and not if you're starting the investigation with a large pool of trade data

But if you have 5, 10 or even 100 suspects from various forums and then join in any trading data along with a time window of opening/closing trades you very quickly end up with a suspect, a search warrant, an indictment, etc.

There would be afterwards though, so the question would be could the money from the trades settle and be exfiltrated to a private non-traceable account before the SEC thought something was amiss and started looking at impacted stocks and suspicious associated trades by timing.

You need a substantial amount of capital to make the short position more profitable than $100k to begin with.

Find nefarious politician’s new fixer, offer to post a deep fake of Biden from Biden’s account expressing grief at finding out his son had acted in bad faith and that he was withdrawing from the election.

Post deep fake from Gates account saying that he did create coronavirus and he’s going to release the antidote. No masks needed. Open the country up.

The chaos and distrust alone would be worth more than 100k.