Elon Musk is keeping busy with yet another appeal in his case against the SEC, in addition to operating Tesla, SpaceX, and — potentially at some point if the buyout is completed — Twitter.
His quarrel with the government agency is over the 2018 settlement he accepted to after being charged with securities fraud over a tweet about taking Tesla private, as it has been for several years. In April, US District Judge Lewis Liman refused to be swayed by Elon’s lawyers’ Eminem-related arguments and upheld the deal as drafted.
Now, Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has filed a motion with the court to appeal the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals. The world’s richest man has claimed that he was pushed into agreeing to a settlement with the SEC, that its investigations into Tesla are “like having a gun to your child’s head,” and that the SEC is biased against him because of his political views, while it continues to monitor his Twitter activity.
“Musk cannot now seek to retract the agreement he knowingly and willingly entered by simply bemoaning that he felt compelled to agree to it at the time but now—once the specter of the litigation has faded and his company has become, in his estimation, all but invincible—wishes that he had not,” Judge Liman wrote in his April decision.
Musk and his attorneys will now try to persuade the judge otherwise in a different courtroom.
