By Jonathan Stempel and Chris Prentice
March 17 (Reuters) – Elon Musk and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are in talks to settle the regulator’s lawsuit accusing the world’s richest person of waiting too long in 2022 to disclose his initial purchases of Twitter, which he eventually bought for $44 billion and renamed X.
In a court filing on Tuesday, the SEC and Musk said they are “engaged in discussions of a potential resolution that would mean further proceedings might not be necessary.”
Both sides asked U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., who oversees the case, to extend a deadline for scheduling further proceedings to April 1 from March 18.
The SEC declined to comment. Musk’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
News of a possible settlement surfaced six weeks after Sooknanan rejected Musk’s bid to dismiss the case, and comes as SEC Chairman Paul Atkins refocuses some of the regulator’s enforcement priorities.
A settlement would end often-fraught litigation between the SEC and Musk that began in September 2018 when the regulator charged Musk with securities fraud for saying on Twitter he had “secured” funding to potentially take his electric car company Tesla private.
Musk, the world’s richest man, settled that case by paying a $20 million civil fine, agreeing to let Tesla lawyers review some Twitter posts in advance, and giving up his role as Tesla’s chairman.
MUSK ACCUSED SEC OF TARGETING HIM
In its January 2025 lawsuit, the SEC said Musk’s 11-day delay in revealing his initial 5% Twitter stake in late March and early April 2022 let him buy more than $500 million of shares at artificially low prices.
The SEC has argued that Musk should pay a civil fine and repay the $150 million he allegedly saved at the expense of unsuspecting investors.
Musk called the delay inadvertent, and accused the SEC of violating his free speech rights by targeting him.
In a separate case on Tuesday, a San Francisco federal jury heard closing arguments in a trial by former Twitter shareholders who said Musk misled them as he tried to back out of the takeover.
Musk has argued that Twitter had more fake accounts than it had disclosed, giving him a reason to abandon the purchase.
X is now part of Musk’s rocket and satellite company SpaceX, following its purchase last month of his artificial intelligence company xAI.
That acquisition created the world’s most valuable private company, worth about $1.25 trillion at the time. SpaceX could sell shares in an initial public offering as early as June.
Musk was worth about $834 billion on Monday, according to Forbes magazine, more than triple the fortune of second-ranked Google co-founder Larry Page.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel and Chris Prentice in New York; Editing by Alison Williams)
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