Elon Musk is scheduled to appear in an interview Thursday with attorneys from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding his acquisition of Twitter stock when it was still a publicly traded company.
Musk was scheduled to meet with SEC lawyers on September 10, but canceled on the same day. Hours before the scheduled meeting, his lawyers sent a letter to the committee’s lawyers informing them that he would not be able to attend because he must be in Florida for a SpaceX launch. .
Thursday’s follow-up interview is part of an SEC investigation into the minority stake Musk accumulated in Twitter Inc. in the months leading up to his decision to buy the company. The SEC alleges that Musk did not disclose the position he was building early enough.
Musk first began buying up Twitter stock (later renamed X) in January 2022, according to SEC filings. By March of the same year, he owned 9.2%, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder. In April, Musk proposed buying the company for $54.20 per share, for a total of $44 billion. A deal was struck a few months later in October, with Musk taking over the social media company.
The deal drew scrutiny from the SEC, which had concerns about the timing of Musk’s disclosure in spring 2022, according to a court filing filed by the SEC in October 2023. declined to comment. Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, did not respond to a request for comment.
In his court filing, Spiro pointed to other instances in which his client participated throughout the investigation. “Mr. Musk produced hundreds of documents and took the stand twice,” Spiro wrote.
Musk’s missed interview in September was the second time he missed an interview with an SEC attorney. In September 2023, the SEC asked the Northern California District Court to issue a subpoena to compel Musk to be present for an interview after he failed to show up for a scheduled meeting, according to court filings.
After it was canceled in September, SEC lawyers asked District Judge Jacqueline Cawley to impose penalties if Musk missed Thursday’s meeting. In a court filing, the SEC said Musk’s recent truancy was “of a playful nature.”
Regulators took issue with the fact that Musk publicly announced he would be in Florida the day before SpaceX’s launch. However, he only informed the SEC that he would not be able to attend the scheduled interview early in the morning.
“Despite this prior knowledge, Mr. Musk did not attend the launch until three hours before his testimony began and after the SEC had spent thousands of dollars to send three lawyers to Los Angeles,” according to court documents. failed to notify the SEC of its intentions,” SEC attorneys filed.
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