‘CROSSED THE LINE’

Elon Musk Can’t Get Out of His ‘Twitter Sitter’ Deal, Judge Rules

The judge denied Musk’s bid to get out of a 2018 SEC agreement just a day after the tech giant secured a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

Just a day after securing a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk’s bid to end an agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission involving oversight over his Tesla-related tweets was denied by a U.S. district court judge on Wednesday. “Musk cannot now seek to retract the agreement he knowingly and willingly entered by simply bemoaning that he felt like he had to agree to it at the time but now—once the specter of the litigation is a distant memory and his company has become, in his estimation, all but invincible—wishes that he had not,” U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman said Wednesday. The judge also denied a request by Musk to throw out a subpoena from the SEC seeking to determine if tweets asking followers to decide if he should sell 10 percent of Tesla via a poll were vetted before being tweeted. Musk’s lawyers have argued that the SEC’s oversight of Musk’s tweets interfered with his First Amendment right to free speech and that they have “crossed the line into harassment.”