Elon Musk is still facing SEC acting as Twitter police over his Tesla (TSLA) tweets
Fred Lambert, 01 June 2021
ew information is revealing that Elon Musk still has the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on his behind acting like Twitter police over his tweets about Tesla.
Tesla, Elon Musk, and the SEC
Musk and the SEC have had a few run-ins with each other, and it was rarely with a good outcome. Most famously, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Musk over his infamous “funding secured” comment regarding his failed attempt to take Tesla private back in 2018. The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) judged that Musk exaggerated when saying that the funding was “secured”:
Musk went on a campaign against the SEC, calling them names and claiming that they were working for people shorting the electric automaker.
Tesla and Musk ended up reaching a settlement with the SEC. As part of the settlement, Musk agreed to step down from the role of Chairman of the board, and both Tesla and Musk had to each pay $20 million fines.
The CEO presumably didn’t want Tesla to have to pay for his issue with the SEC, and while he couldn’t directly pay for Tesla’s part of the fine, he decided to buy $20 million worth of shares from Tesla. That way, he sort of indirectly ended up paying for Tesla’s fine – though he also ended up with ~71,000 additional Tesla shares in the process.
