Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Axel Springer Award ceremony in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020.Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Last spring, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission admonished Tesla and CEO Elon Musk for allegedly violating terms of a 2019 revised settlement agreement, according to correspondence first obtained and reported on by the Wall Street Journal.
SEC officials pointed to a tweet on May 1, 2020, in which Musk said that Tesla’s stock price was “too high,” prompting a more than $13 billion decline in the company’s market value, according to the report. The SEC also pointed to Musk tweets from 2019, where he discussed solar roof production numbers without obtaining pre-approvals, the Journal said.
While the securities regulators monitored Musk’s use of Twitter amid the pandemic, and confronted him and Tesla via correspondence, they did not file a motion to compel enforcement of the settlement agreement.
Musk is required to have Tesla-related tweets that contain material company information approved by an attorney before posting them. A so-called “twitter sitter” was part of a revised settlement agreement struck between the SEC, Musk and Tesla. The settlement terms also required Musk
