Investing.com - Elon Musk’s itchy Twitter fingers have failed him again after a tweet he sent to his 25 million followers late last month got him in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The SEC has asked a federal judge to hold the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) boss in contempt for a Feb. 19 tweet about his electric car company.
"Tesla made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019," the offending tweet reads. This was misleading, according to SEC officials, because the true output for this year will be considerably lower.
Musk issued a clarifying tweet a few hours after the first one: "Meant to say annualized production rate at end of 2019 probably around 500k, ie 10k cars/week. Deliveries for year still estimated to be about 400k."
That could jeopardize the deal he struck last September with the SEC, which notably required Musk to step down as Tesla chair and pay a fine of $20 million.
Musk’s Twitter use is supposed to be sharply observed after the Tesla CEO reached a settlement with the SEC for a different twitter-related controversy last year, when he claimed he had sufficient funding to take Tesla private.
“While Musk claims to ‘respect the justice system,’ his deliberate indifference to compliance with this Court’s final judgment indicates otherwise,” the SEC argues.
Musk has a long history of disagreements with the SEC, which he once termed the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission”.
In a Feb. 26 tweet, he said that "something is broken with SEC oversight."
Shares of the electric-car maker, which have lost 17% in the past 12 months, are currently trading near their lowest level since October.
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