Illustration: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images
The Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing “numerous counts” against Elon Musk, according to a letter from his lawyer that Musk posted to X. It has also “reopened an investigation into Neuralink.”
The letter is short on specifics — such as what the charges may be, and how many Musk companies are affected. Instead, Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, complains that “the Commission Staff issued a settlement demand that required Mr. Musk agree within 48 hours to either accept a monetary payment or face charges on numerous accounts.” Even this is somewhat unclear; presumably, Spiro means that Musk would pay a penalty rather than accept money from the SEC.
Oh Gary, how could you do this to me? pic.twitter.com/OoooQI77ZS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2024
Musk has a long and storied history with the SEC, which he has said he does not respect. In 2018, Musk briefly pretended he’d take Tesla private before admitting two weeks later Tesla would stay public. The SEC then sued him over a tweet saying he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. Musk reached a settlement with the agency, paying $20 million, stepping down as chair of Tesla’s board and agreeing to a “Twitter sitter,” or a lawyer who’d supervise his tweets. Musk then reneged on the Twitter sitter thing. That particular kerfuffle went all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case; Musk was stuck with his Twitter sitter.
The letter characterizes this history as “more than six years of harassment.”
More recently, the SEC sought to sanction Musk for no-showing on them in a separate investigation over his Twitter takeover. A judge declined to sanction him because he reimbursed the SEC for the airfare of the lawyers he stood up.
It is unclear from Spiro’s letter whether the charges the SEC is pursuing have to do with the Twitter matter or something else. Reuters previously reported that the Department of Justice was probing whether Tesla’s self-driving claims were actually securities fraud. In 2023, Reuters reported that lawmakers had asked the SEC to probe Neuralink over Musk’s comments about the safety of the company’s brain device.
Musk also asked his AI, Grok, to draw a picture of SEC chair Gary Gensler. The image depicted a snail in a business suit, seemingly a reference to Gary the Snail from Spongebob Squarepants, a television show for children.