The Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking sanctions against Elon Musk after he no-showed a planned testimony concerning his purchase of Twitter (now X) earlier this month.
The SpaceX head was ordered to testify as part of an ongoing SEC investigation into his 2022 purchase of Twitter for $44 billion, probing whether Musk intentionally failed to make proper legal disclosures when buying Twitter shares and whether he made misleading statements to sway the deal.
The Tesla CEO was set to testify on Sept. 10 in Los Angeles. The SEC says they were notified just hours before the hearing that Musk was on the other side of the country attending a planned SpaceX rocket launch. The launch had been announced days before.
“Despite this advance knowledge, Musk did not notify the SEC of his intent to attend the launch until three hours before his testimony was to begin, and after the SEC spent thousands of dollars to fly three attorneys to Los Angeles,” attorneys for the SEC said in a filing on Friday.
The SEC is asking that Musk be held in contempt of court and is also requesting he pony up for the cost of flying their attorneys out for the aborted hearing.
Musk has had a tense relationship with the SEC since the agency sued him in 2018, after Musk announced that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. The agency accused Musk of fibbing to manipulate his company’s stock prices. Musk settled that lawsuit for $20 million that same year, agreeing to step down from his role as Tesla’s chairman as part of the settlement.
Musk is currently embattled in a number of other legal feuds. He currently faces a lawsuit from the party game company Cards Against Humanity, which says SpaceX illegally trespassed on land it owns in Texas. The card game manufacturer purchased the land in an attempt to prevent the construction of a border wall by then-President Donald Trump and claims Musk’s nearby SpaceX facilities have been leaving equipment on their land.
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