he made that change, he confessed: “I was just
playing the fool on Twitter.”
Musk’s apparent intention to leave Twitter after
a decade on the social media service attracted
widespread attention largely because his
account has turned into a hornet’s nest during
the past year.
The biggest flap occurred last August when
he tweeted that he had lined up the financing
necessary to buy Tesla in a buyout that would
have likely cost more than $20 billion, causing
the electric car maker’s stock to swing wildly. An
offer never materialized, and the Securities and
Exchange Commission later accused Musk of
using Twitter to mislead investors.
Musk denied the allegations, but he and Tesla
eventually reached a $40 million settlement
with the SEC after regulators threatened to
seek his ouster as the company’s CEO. Instead,
Musk agreed to step down as Tesla’s chairman
for at least three years and also stipulated that
his tweets tied to the company be prescreened
for accuracy.
Twitter got Musk into trouble again in February
when the SEC alleged a tweet about how many
cars Tesla will manufacture this year represented
another misleading statement and sought to
hold him in contempt of court for violating the
settlement. That resulted in a new settlement
that is supposed to put even tighter controls on
Musk’s tweets about the company.
Musk also is embroiled in a defamation lawsuit
for a tweet that described a British diver involved
in a rescue of boys trapped in an underwater
cave in Thailand as a pedophile. That tweet,
posted last July, has since been deleted, and
Musk is now fighting the lawsuit filed by Vernon
Unsworth in a Los Angeles state court.
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