After Tesla CEO Elon Musk alleged ‘unrelenting investigation,' SEC pushes back
The Securities and Exchange Commission submitted a letter to a federal judge on Friday responding to allegations by Tesla CEO Elon Musk that the agency had “broken promises” and engaged in a “pattern of conduct” amounting to harassment after an earlier settlement agreement.
In September 2018, the SEC charged Musk with making “false and misleading” statements to investors after he announced via Twitter that he had secured funding for a private buyout of Tesla at $420 a share. Following his tweets, Tesla stock went into a period of unusual volatility and the deal Musk alluded to never materialized.
Tesla, Musk and the SEC eventually struck a revised settlement agreement in 2019 to resolve the charges.
As part of the deal, Musk had to temporarily relinquish his role as chairman of Tesla's board and to pay a $20 million fine individually. Tesla also had to pay a $20 million fine. Musk and Tesla agreed the celebrity-CEO would have the content of his social media posts approved by a securities law expert before publishing them on occasions when they contained material business information.
The $40 million they paid was supposed to be distributed to Tesla shareholders after that.
In a letter sent on behalf of Musk and Tesla to the court Thursday, attorney Alex Spiro suggested the SEC had been ignoring their duty to remit that $40 million to Tesla shareholders.
The SEC's Stephen Buchholz replied Friday, saying the agency was actually making progress on that task, which was fairly complex. He noted that Tesla had never expressed any concern about this to the agency before and that SEC staff expect to submit a “proposed plan of distribution” to the court for approval by the end of March 2022.
Musk's attorney, Spiro, also suggested that the SEC was not focused on remittance because it was too busy investigating and issuing more subpoenas to Tesla. The attorney wrote, “The SEC seems to be targeting Mr. Musk and Tesla for unrelenting investigation largely because Mr. Musk remains an outspoken critic of the government.”
Musk's battles with regulators tend to be public and messy, occasionally including vulgar taunts. The CEO has expressed his displeasure with the SEC on Twitter on multiple occasions, including in October 2018 when he called the agency the “shortseller enrichment commission,” and in July 2020 when he wrote: “SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon's.”
Spiro also suggested that the SEC's ongoing investigative activity seemed “calculated to chill” Musk's First Amendment rights.
In a recent financial filing for the fourth-quarter of 2021, Tesla revealed that it had received a subpoena from the SEC late last year. The filings said: “On November 16, 2021, the SEC issued a subpoena to us seeking information on our governance processes around compliance with the SEC settlement, as amended.”
Friday's SEC letter to the court argued that Tesla was not following proper procedures to challenge any subpoena the agency had issued as an independent regulator, aside from the court proceedings.
美国证券交易委员会周五向联邦法官提交了一封信，回应特斯拉首席执行官埃隆·马斯克 (Elon Musk) 的指控，称该机构“违背承诺”并在早些时候达成和解协议后采取了相当于骚扰的“行为模式”。 2018 年 9 月，在马斯克通过 Twitter 宣布以每股 420 美元的价格私下收购特斯拉获得资金后，美国证券交易委员会指控马斯克向投资者做出“虚假和误导性”陈述。在他的推文之后，特斯拉股票进入了一段异常波动的时期，马斯克暗示的交易从未实现。
特斯拉、马斯克和 SEC 最终在 2019 年达成了一项修订后的和解协议，以解决这些指控。
作为交易的一部分，马斯克不得不暂时放弃他作为特斯拉董事会主席的角色，并单独支付 2000 万美元的罚款。特斯拉还不得不支付 2000 万美元的罚款。马斯克和特斯拉同意，这位名人 CEO 的社交媒体帖子内容必须先获得证券法专家的批准，然后才会在某些情况下发布包含重要商业信息的帖子。
他们支付的 4000 万美元应该在那之后分配给特斯拉的股东。
在周四代表马斯克和特斯拉发给法院的一封信中，律师亚历克斯·斯皮罗暗示美国证券交易委员会一直无视他们将 4000 万美元汇给特斯拉股东的义务。
SEC 的 Stephen Buchholz 周五回复说，该机构实际上在这项相当复杂的任务上取得了进展。他指出，特斯拉此前从未向该机构表达过对此的任何担忧，SEC 工作人员预计将在 2022 年 3 月底之前向法院提交一份“拟议的分配计划”以供批准。
马斯克的律师斯皮罗也表示，SEC 并没有专注于汇款，因为它正忙于调查并向特斯拉发出更多传票。这位律师写道，“美国证券交易委员会似乎针对马斯克先生和特斯拉进行了不懈的调查，主要是因为马斯克先生仍然直言不讳地批评政府。”
马斯克与监管机构的斗争往往是公开的、混乱的，偶尔还包括粗俗的嘲讽。这位首席执行官曾多次在 Twitter 上表达了他对 SEC 的不满，包括 2018 年 10 月他称该机构为“卖空者致富委员会”，以及 2020 年 7 月他写道：“SEC，三个字母的首字母缩写词，中间词是 Elon's 。”
斯皮罗还表示，SEC 正在进行的调查活动似乎“旨在冷却”马斯克的第一修正案权利。
在最近提交的 2021 年第四季度财务报告中，特斯拉透露，它已于去年底收到美国证券交易委员会的传票。文件称：“2021 年 11 月 16 日，美国证券交易委员会向我们发出传票，要求我们提供有关我们遵守经修订的美国证券交易委员会和解协议的治理流程的信息。”
周五美国证券交易委员会致法院的信函称，除了法院诉讼程序外，特斯拉没有遵循适当的程序来质疑该机构作为独立监管机构发出的任何传票。
