Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, attempted to withdraw from a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 following a string of tweets about the automaker that authorities claimed were fraudulent, but the Supreme Court denied his plea on Monday.
The SEC stated that Musk's now-famous 2018 tweet, which claimed he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 per share, was false. As a result, the company's stock price saw extreme fluctuations.
Musk consented to a deal that required him to get approval from a business lawyer before posting anything about Tesla on social media in order to avoid enforcement.
Though he agreed to the “Twitter sitter” provision, Musk has subsequently challenged it as a violation of his First Amendment rights. Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X.
The Supreme Court rejected Musk’s appeal without comment and there were no noted dissents.
A US District Court and the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Musk’s request to declare the Twitter sitter provision unenforceable.
We see no evidence to support Musk’s contention that the SEC has used the consent decree to conduct bad-faith, harassing investigations of his protected speech,” a three-judge appeals court panel wrote last year. “Had Musk wished to preserve his right to tweet without even limited internal oversight concerning certain Tesla-related topics, he had ‘the right to litigate and defend against the [SEC’s] charges’ or to negotiate a different agreement – but he chose not to
do so.”
No comments