Musk avoids punishment after paying airfare for SEC staff

US District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said Friday there is no need to sanction Musk because he already agreed to reimburse the SEC $2,923 to cover airfare for the trio of agency lawyers he stood up in Los Angeles in September. Musk finally met with the SEC lawyers to give testimony on Oct. 3, Corley noted.

The regulator has been investigating Musk’s purchases of Twitter Inc. stock and statements about his investments before he spent $44 billion in 2022 to buy the social-media platform, which he later rebranded as X.

Musk has had a testy relationship with the SEC for years, going back to when it sued him for securities fraud in 2018 after he tweeted about taking Tesla Inc. private. In the Twitter probe, Corley repeatedly ordered Musk to cooperate with the agency after he initially did two interviews but refused to participate in a third round of questioning. 

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, had argued that the billionaire’s failure to show up for the September deposition was justified because he had an urgent obligation as the head of SpaceX to travel to Florida for the Cape Canaveral launch of a rocket on a commercial spacewalk mission.

The SEC urged Corley to impose sanctions on Musk to remind him that flouting her order was not a “trivial matter,” but Spiro contended that his client’s voluntary offer to reimburse the agency for $2,923 was sufficient.

The case is Securities and Exchange Commission v. Musk, 23-mc-80253, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).