Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW)

When I asked University of Arizona legal scholar William Sjostrom about the way Elon Musk announced his plan to take Tesla private, he was scathing.

“A securities attorney would say ‘what the hell are you doing?'” Sjostrom told me on Wendesday.

When making a big, market-moving announcement, companies normally halt trading and provide the entire proposal in one well-vetted document—they don’t dribble it out in a series of tweets.