TESLA CEO MUSK ACCUSES SEC OF ‘ FREEZING HIS RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH

Fri 18 February 2022:

According to a court filing on Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has accused the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of “harassment” and depriving him of his right to free speech as the SEC continues to monitor his interactions with shareholders following the 2018 settlement he reached over a company miscommunication.

In a court filing, Musk’s lawyer, Alex Shapiro, said in the court filing that his client and Tesla had expected the settlement to end the SEC’s “harassment” and allow the court, not the agency, to monitor his compliance,

“But the SEC has broken its promises,” the filing said, adding that the agency had been “weaponizing the consent decree by using it to try to muzzle and harass Mr. Musk and Tesla.”

Musk indicated in a now-deleted tweet on Twitter in August 2018 that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 (a share) and that the funding was in place.

Musk did not have the funding he claimed, and the tweet was ruled to be in breach of the SEC’s guidelines on shareholder communication. Musk was also fined $40 million by the FCC as part of the settlement.

Musk said in a court filing earlier this month that his 2018 proposal to delist Tesla, which is now trading at slightly less than $900 per share, was “entirely truthful” and that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund was ready to back him at the time. Investors who felt Musk’s communication on the subject was fraudulent were wrong, Musk said.

Tesla’s CEO also claimed that the SEC was attempting to “chill” his right to free speech.

“The SEC seems to be targeting Mr. Musk and Tesla for unrelenting investigation largely because Mr. Musk remains an outspoken critic of the government,” the filing said. “The SEC’s outsized efforts seem calculated to chill his exercise of First Amendment rights rather than to enforce generally applicable laws in evenhanded fashion.”

The SEC has increased its monitoring of Musk following an event in November in which he polled his millions of Twitter followers on whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock. The majority of people said yes. Critics claim that by September, Musk had already decided to sell a significant amount of that stock, reopening the question of whether he misled Tesla shareholders.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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