Elon Musk has agreed to testify before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in its investigation into his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, after a months-long legal battle.
According to reports on Thursday, the billionaire tech mogul is scheduled to sit for a deposition for up to five hours in one of the agency’s offices. Court filings.
The SEC sued Musk in October and compelled him to testify. The committee was investigating whether Musk violated federal security laws in connection with his 2022 purchase of Twitter shares and statements he made about the social media company and in SEC filings.
Musk initially held two half-day sessions with the SEC in 2022. A year later, the SEC invited him to appear at another session, but Musk refused to attend, sparking the latest legal battle.
A magistrate judge in February ruled that Musk must give a deposition, but after the magistrate judge questioned her jurisdiction, she referred the matter to a district judge. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corey upheld the earlier ruling this month and ordered Musk to testify.
Musk has argued that the SEC’s request for his testimony is unjustified, despite him having met with the agency twice before, but Corey dismissed that argument as “unconvincing” and noted that the SEC has received “thousands of new documents” since the first two meetings.
She also denied Musk’s assertion that senior FBI advisers lack the power to issue subpoenas for testimony.
Musk, who has a long and checkered history with the SEC, suffered a new legal setback last month when the Supreme Court rejected his challenge to a 2018 settlement agreement with the SEC that required his lawyers to approve some of his public posts about Tesla.
