The US Securities and Exchange Commission said it is pursuing a court order to compel the Global tech giant Tesla CEO, the man who came up with the idea of widely discussed acquisition deal of the popular social media platform, Twitter, Elon Musk, to testify as part of a probe into his Twitter acquisition, a deal worth $44 billion.
Reportedly, the investigation, which escalates a long-running feud between the SEC and Musk, concerns whether Musk broke federal securities laws in 2022 when he bought stock in Twitter, which Musk renamed as well as statements and SEC filings he made in relation to the deal.
SEC Claims
According to a filing made by the SEC in a federal court in San Francisco, Musk failed to appear for testimony on September 15, 2023, as required by the investigative subpoena served by the SEC. Despite in May 2023, agreeing to appear for testimony on a date nearly four months later, in September 2023, having been served with a subpoena in May 2023 requiring his appearance for testimony in the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office on that mutually agreed upon date in September.
Raising no objection to the subpoena at the time it was served or during the following months, and approximately two weeks before his scheduled testimony, Musk abruptly notified the SEC staff that he would not appear. He attempted to justify his refusal to comply with the subpoena by raising, for the first time, several spurious objections, including an objection to San Francisco as an appropriate testimony location.
Musk also refused SEC proposals to conduct the deposition in Texas in October or November. Among his objections was that the SEC was trying to ‘harass’ him and his counsel needed time to review potentially relevant material contained in a biography of Musk published last month, the SEC further added in the filing.
Musk has given the SEC documents relating to the probe and has previously provided testimony in July last year via video conference, it said.
“SEC has already taken Musk’s testimony multiple times in this misguided investigation — enough is enough,” Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, reportedly said in an emailed statement.
According to the SEC, it has been gathering information on the time before Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022, when the firm was still publicly listed. The regulators claimed that it had not come to the conclusion that anyone had broken the federal securities laws.
As per media sources, U.S. District Judge Andrew Carter had rejected Musk’s attempt to dismiss the case last week, sharing the doubts about suggestions by stating, “Musk was somehow ‘too busy’ to comply with SEC disclosure rules about his ownership stake in Twitter, while simultaneously buying millions of shares of stock of Twitter, tweeting about the state of Twitter as a social media platform, and meeting with several Twitter executives and insiders.”
The feud between the SEC and Musk dates back to the Tesla CEO’s tweets in 2018 discussing a deal to take the electric car manufacturer private at $420 per share.
