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Mike Blake | Reuters
SpaceX founder Elon Musk looks on at a post-launch news conference after the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft, lifted off on an uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, March 2, 2019.
Chief Executive Elon Musk has never sought pre-approval for a single tweet about Tesla since striking a court-approved deal about how to communicate important information about the electric vehicle maker, the top U.S. securities regulator told a judge on Monday.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is doubling down on the government’s demand to find the Tesla CEO in contempt of a previous fraud settlement that required him to have the company pre-approve any tweets that could materially impact the automaker.
The ongoing public battle between Tesla’s chief executive and the SEC piles pressure on Musk, the public face of Tesla, who is struggling to make the company profitable after cutting the price of its Model 3 sedan to $35,000.
The SEC said a Feb. 19 tweet that Musk sent to his more than 24 million Twitter followers claiming the electric vehicle-maker would build around 500,000 cars in 2019 was “a blatant violation” of the agreement.
The SEC asked Tesla in late February whether any of Musk’s tweets had been pre-approved since that policy was adopted, according to the filing in federal court in Manhattan.
Tesla responded, after more than two weeks, to say simply: “No.”
“It is therefore stunning to learn that, at the time of filing of the instant motion, Musk had not sought pre-approval for a single one of the numerous tweets about Tesla he published in the months since the court-ordered pre-approval policy went into effect,” the SEC said in the filing.
