00:00You might have seen this. One of the world's most prominent short sellers, Andrew Left,
00:03has been found guilty of securities fraud. It follows a three-week trial in L.A. that centered
00:08on social media posts about dozens of companies. Eric Larson, our Bloomberg reporter, is in L.A.
00:13for us to talk us through the significance of this verdict and perhaps what's next here, Eric.
00:19Yeah, I mean, what's next here is that he is going to be sentenced by a federal judge here in
00:24L.A.
00:25on August 31st. He faces up to 25 years in prison on the securities fraud charge, a maximum on that
00:33first count, the most serious one that he was found guilty of, although oftentimes these white-collar
00:39criminal defendants end up getting a lot less than the maximum. There's also going to be a motion by
00:45his lawyer for a mistrial, sort of a last-ditch effort to have the verdict thrown out, and then,
00:50of course, also an appeal. Okay, what are other short sellers saying about this, about this case?
00:58Well, you know, they were pretty critical of the case. The investigation went on for a couple of
01:04years before Mr. Left was charged in 2024. There was concern about this basically infringing the speech
01:12of these activist short sellers who wanted to be able to say whatever they wanted about a company on
01:18social media or on TV even, and then make trades around the reports that they issue. A fairly
01:26common practice. A little different, though, the government claims that Mr. Left didn't always
01:31believe what he was even saying, and that he specifically would just try to move the stock
01:36rather than try to inform the market about an issue a company was having, that it was a very calculated
01:42effort to set up trades in advance, use his power on social media, on Twitter to move the market,
01:50and then really quickly close out his positions and make money. The government said that by doing
01:55this, he actually made over $20 million in profit from 2018 to 2023.
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