Elon Musk asks U.S. Justice to remove oversight of his tweets about Tesla
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has asked the U.S. judiciary on Tuesday to remove judicial oversight of his tweets related to Tesla – a measure imposed on him in 2018 by the stock market regulator – in light of his recent trial victory over the fallout from those messages.
The entrepreneur’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has asked an appeals court to suspend the measure, considering it to be “unconstitutional” for having been imposed “through a trap” and involve for all practical purposes “extortion”.
In a trial in San Francisco that concluded on February 3, Musk was found to have not liable for alleged losses in the millions of dollars. that several investors attributed to tweets he wrote in 2018, in which he said he had sufficient funds to take the company off the stock market, something that never happened.
In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). charged Musk with fraud for the messages, and the entrepreneur settled the case by agreeing to pay a fine, temporarily stepping aside from an executive position and agreeing to have a lawyer monitor his Tesla-related tweets due to their potential impact on the trading floor.
Musk had previously unsuccessfully appealed the settlement by arguing that. violates his freedom of speech and now claims that that measure does not stand up after the San Francisco jury found in its verdict that the tweets were not misleading, the premise from which that supervisory order was based.
“I am considering Taking Tesla public at $420. Funding secured“, said the tweet subjected to so much scrutiny, in which Musk referred to the price per share he could offer in the transaction and which would have valued the company at around $72 billion.
He then added another message that read, “Investor support is confirmed. The only reason this is not certain is that it depends on the shareholder vote.”
