Tesla receives subpoena from SEC over 2018 settlement on Musk's tweets

• Tesla agreed to run Musk’s  tweets through company lawyers

• Musk polled his Twitter followers last year whether he should sell 10% of his stake

Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) received another subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), seeking information on the governance process about the settlement that required CEO Elon Musk’s tweets to be examined.

The carmaker in regulatory filings published Monday disclosed that SEC had sent the subpoena on November 16, 2021, regarding the compliance with a settlement that Tesla reached with the agency after Musk tweeted that he would take the EV maker private.

The November subpoena came ten days after Musk triggered a stock sell-off over a weekend after asking his Twitter followers whether he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla.

A lawsuit hit the EV maker in December following the tweet, which plunged Tesla’s share over 16%.

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The largest carmaker in the U.S. jumped briefly after the market opened on Monday to $947.77 but plunged over 4.2% to $907.39 at 11:45 ET in New York.

Controversy around Musk’s tweet

In August 2018, Musk tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private.”

Although Tesla did not elaborate on the exact cause of another SEC subpoena in the filings published Monday, the company in 2019 agreed to oversee Musk’s communications, including his tweets, after the SEC alleged the CEO committed securities fraud.

The SEC and the EV maker decided that Musk cannot communicate about specific topics, neither by writing nor tweets, without running them through Tesla’s lawyers.

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In a class-action lawsuit pending in federal court in San Francisco, Tesla shareholders claimed that Musk’s tweets cost them billions of dollars in losses.

However, Musk’s lawyers last week said that his August 2018 tweet was “entirely truthful.”

Bitcoin holdings

Tesla also disclosed that the “fair market value” of its Bitcoin holdings swelled to $1.99 billion as of December 31, 2021.

In the filing, the company said it spent around $1.5 billion in 2021 in buying Bitcoin.

Although Tesla suffered a $101 million impairment loss on its digital asset holdings, it profited $128 million from selling a portion of its holdings in March 2021.

Picture Credit: FT