The Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal from Tesla CEO Elon Musk to withdraw from a settlement agreement he made with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018. No comments were given, and there were no dissents.
The agreement was over a series of posts on Twitter—now X—in which Musk said he had “funding secured” to take the car company private at $420 a share. The SEC in turn said that the statement was untrue, all of which led to extreme fluctuation in the company’s stock price. Musk then struck a deal with the SEC that mandated that a company lawyer approve all Tesla-related social media posts.
Musk later challenged the agreement as an infraction on his First Amendment rights. Before the Supreme Court, a U.S. District Court and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal denied the CEO’s request to declare the agreement unenforceable.
“We see no evidence to support Musk’s contention that the SEC has used the consent decree to conduct bad-faith, harassing investigations of his protected speech,” a three-judge appeals court panel wrote in 2023. “Had Musk wished to preserve his right to tweet without even limited internal oversight concerning certain Tesla-related topics, he had ‘the right to litigate and defend against the [SEC’s] charges’ or to negotiate a different agreement – but he chose not to do so.”
