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Elon Musk is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit by US regulators alleging he wrongly saved money by revealing he increased his initial investment in Twitter too late.<\/p>\n
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a January complaint<\/a> that Musk failed to disclose that he had built up his stake in the company within the regulator’s timeframe.<\/p>\n It said this had allowed him to save about $150m (\u00a3123m) by purchasing shares in Twitter – which he bought outright months later and renamed X – at “artificially low prices”. <\/p>\n Musk’s lawyers, filing shortly before the court’s deadline for his response, called the lawsuit “a waste of this Court’s time and taxpayer resources”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n “The SEC does not allege that Mr. Musk caused any investor harm. Rather, the SEC alleges that Mr. Musk late-filed a single beneficial ownership form three years ago, and fully corrected any alleged error immediately upon its discovery,” they said in their Thursday filing.<\/p>\n “There is no ongoing violation. There is no intent. There is no harm.”<\/p>\n In its January complaint, the SEC alleged that Musk violated US securities rules requiring investors to disclose within 10 days if their holdings in a company surpass 5%.<\/p>\n It said Musk should have revealed he had crossed the threshold for disclosure of shares by 14 March 2022, but he did not disclose it until 21 days after his purchase – on 4 April.<\/p>\n “Musk’s violation resulted in substantial economic harm to investors,” it claimed.<\/p>\n During a prior investigation by the SEC into Musk’s purchase of Twitter, he gave two depositions – with mystery surrounding whether he appeared at a further interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n When the SEC filed its lawsuit in January, Musk blasted the regulator as a “totally broken organisation” on social media and accused it of wasting its time.<\/p>\n His lawyers’ formal response<\/a>, submitted on Thursday, also accused the SEC of targeting the executive in a “relentless pursuit”.<\/p>\n “The Commission’s selective enforcement against Mr. Musk – seeking monetary relief more than 1,500 times larger than the relief imposed on similarly situated individuals in similar cases – reveals an agency targeting an individual for his protected criticism of government overreach,” it said.<\/p>\n It said other investigations launched by the watchdog over the past seven years – including one in which he was eventually cleared by a jury of wrongdoing over a tweet about the future of Tesla’s ownership<\/a> – reflected “relentless scrutiny”.<\/p>\n The SEC declined to comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n