Elon Musk's Lawyer Asks Court to Cancel 'Twitter sitter' Deal with SEC

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Elon Musk’s lawyer asks court to cancel 2018 “Twitter sitter” deal with the SEC. The move comes after earlier this month, a jury found Musk's tweets leading up to the deal as not misleading.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Attorney Alex Spiro once again appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit requesting that the 2018 deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) be canceled. Under the deal, all of Musk's tweets that contained material information about the company had to be verified by the company's lawyer (“Twitter sitter”) before they could be posted to Twitter.

The move comes after a February 3 jury in San Francisco federal court found that Musk and Tesla were not liable in a class-action securities fraud lawsuit related to Musk's 2018 privatization tweets. Tesla's shareholder group, which consisted of short sellers of the company's shares, filed a lawsuit in an attempt to shift responsibility for their poor financial decisions to Musk and Tesla. During the trial, it was confirmed that Musk did not mislead shareholders when he posted tweets from his personal Twitter account.

“The jury’s verdict provides further reason why the public interest in avoiding unconstitutional settlements easily subsumes the SEC’s purported stake in the consent decree,” Spiro wrote in a filing.

In 2018, under pressure from banks, Musk made a deal with the SEC, in which he and Tesla paid a fine of $20 million each. In addition, the CEO had to show tweets containing important information about Tesla to the company's lawyer before publication on Twitter.

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