SEC Not Happy With 2 of Elon Musk's Tweets: Report

The Securities and Exchange Commission believes Tesla CEO Elon Musk has twice violated a court order requiring the company's lawyers to approve certain tweets about Tesla before he posts them, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal. Regulators sent letters to Tesla in 2019 and 2020 saying no pre-approval had taken place when Musk tweeted about the company's solar roof production volumes in July 2019, and then, less than a year later, tweeted a claim that Tesla's stock price was "too high."

Musk had agreed in 2018 to the pre-approval requirement when Tesla settled with the SEC over Musk's 2018 tweets about a potential buyout of the car manufacturer. At first, it required all his tweets to be overseen, but it was amended the following year to apply only to certain topics. But Tesla said that the solar roof tweet was not required to be pre-approved since it was "wholly aspirational," while the stock price tweet was simply an expression of Musk's opinion. See the full story at the Journal, which says the issue appears to have ended in a "stalemate." (More Elon Musk stories.)