Elon Musk vs. the SEC: The Tesla billionaire gears up for the fight of his career - The Washington Post
Elon Musk vs. the SEC: The Tesla billionaire gears up for the fight of his career - The Washington Post
He has fought back viciously by calling his opponents names like “saboteur,” “idiot” and “pedophile.” Now, Tesla chief Elon Musk is embracing the same kind of combative approach to wage the fight of his career against the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The coming legal clash will pit the volatile billionaire against a team of federal regulators, who say he manipulated markets and fraudulently misled investors by claiming in a series of tweets that he had secured the funding to take Tesla private. If the agency wins, it will seek to ban him from serving as an executive of any public company, including the electric automaker he has devoted his life to for 15 years.
Musk could have compromised earlier this week when the SEC offered to not press charges if he temporarily stepped down as chairman, people familiar with the matter said. But in a characteristically risky gamble, Musk rejected the deal. Instead, he is gearing up for war with the help of Chris Clark, the legal brawler who another flamboyant billionaire, Mark Cuban, retained to beat the SEC’s charges of insider trading.
Musk said in a statement that the SEC’s “unjustified action" left him “deeply saddened and disappointed.” “Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way,” he added.
Hanging in the balance is Tesla, the $45 billion emblem of America’s future in battery-powered cars. The cash-burning giant has suffered a series of disasters under Musk’s unpredictable leadership, and legal experts predicted the SEC storm could top them all.
A protracted conflict could sidetrack employees and spook investors during one of Tesla’s most critical points in company history, as it struggles to emerge from a chaotic period of executive exits and factory crises that Musk has called “production hell.”