Posted on by

Elon Musk’s lawyer asks court to throw out ‘Twitter sitter’ deal with SEC



Share

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., departs court in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023.Marlena Sloss | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesFollowing Elon Musk’s recent victory in a securities fraud trial, the Tesla CEO’s lawyer has once again asked an appeals court to throw out his 2018 deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission requiring a company lawyer to review his Tesla-related tweets before sharing them.On Feb. 3, a jury in a in a San Francisco federal court found that Musk and Tesla were not liable in a class-action securities fraud trial stemming from tweets Musk made in 2018.The centi-billionaire, who is also the CEO of SpaceX and Twitter, was sued by Tesla shareholders over a series of tweets he wrote in August 2018 saying he had “funding secured” to take the automaker private for $420 per share, and that “investor support” for such a deal was “confirmed.”Trading in Tesla was halted after his tweets, and its share price remained volatile for weeks.Musk had previously settled with the SEC over the tweets in 2018, and eventually struck a revised settlement agreement that called for a legal and regulatory compliance point person at Tesla (informally, a “Twitter sitter”) to pre-approve any of Musk’s tweets containing any information about the publicly traded company that could affect its stock price. Musk’s attorney, Quinn Emanuel Partner Alex Spiro, wrote in a letter to the court this week that the SEC lacks support for their revised settlement agreement in light of the jury’s recent finding.”The jury’s verdict provides further reason why the public interest in avoiding unconstitu …

Read More