Tesla stock price is like 95% expectations of massive future growth created by the super amazing genius of Elon. If Tesla becomes just a basic car company it will be destroyed.
The shareholders know the stock is massively overvalued but that's not useful to them unless they sell now and if they sell now the stock will crash. They know this bubble can't last because they know their global market share is in the toilet and artificially bigging up the stock won't help with that.
Likely there was a risk for a defamation lawsuit which had a slight risk of a prison sentence? Or Elon finally realised that pissing off Trump more will not help his businesses in the USA.
Defamation isn't criminal, so usually just financial, and even then it can be hard to take money sometimes. See Alex Jones 1.5B defamation loss and how much he's not complying.
Elon's brain: I'm sure nobody took a screenshot.
Everyone knows that once you delete something from the internet it's gone forever.
Especially Beyonce, Barbara Streisand, and a few others