Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc., has asked a federal court to terminate a settlement agreement he reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Wall Street Journal reported. In 2018, Musk agreed to settle, after the SEC charged that he misled investors when he sent Twitter messages claiming that the company had funding to go private. Among the terms of the settlement were that he step down as chair of Tesla’s board, while remaining CEO, and that Tesla create controls to oversee his communications, including his tweets. In addition, Tesla agreed to appoint two new independent board members, and Tesla and Musk each agreed to pay a fine of $20 million.

Now Musk is arguing that the Twitter oversight policy has become unworkable, and that the SEC has abused the settlement in order to make “round after round of demands for voluminous, costly document productions, with no signs of abatement.”

In a separate filing, Musk is disputing the SEC’s original claims that he defrauded investors when he tweeted about securing funding to take Tesla private. He claims that he felt pressured to settle the SEC’s civil lawsuit, adding: “I never lied to shareholders. I would never lie to shareholders. I entered the consent decree for the survival of Tesla, for the sake of its shareholders.”

An SEC spokesman declined to comment to the Journal.

Subsequent to the 2018 settlement, the SEC embarked on a new investigation of Musk stemming from trading he engaged in, along with this brother Kimbal Musk. Elon Musk polled Twitter users in 2021, asking whether he should sell 10 percent of his stake in Tesla and pledging to abide by the poll results. His brother sold shares of Tesla stock worth roughly $108 million one day before that tweet.

At issue since 2018  has been the extent of preclearance that the settlement agreement required Tesla lawyers to perform of Musk’s tweets and other public communications. In 2019 and 2020, the SEC told Tesla that Musk tweeted about the company business without preclearance. For example, in 2019,  the SEC asked a judge to hold Musk in contempt, charging that he violated the SEC settlement agreement by announcing over Twitter that Tesla would produce about half a million cars in that year; he quickly correcting himself hours later, saying it would be more like 400,000. In his defense, the company said that although the tweet was not preapproved, Musk believed the substance of the message had been.  

Musk has also disputed that some statements from 2019 and 2020 were governed by the settlement, which covers only the dissemination of financial, production and management information.

In the recent filing, a lawyer for Musk and Tesla asked the court to quash part of an SEC subpoena issued in November 2021 that sought information from Musk about whether his poll tweets had been precleared. The attorney argued that the SEC can’t further investigate Musk’s tweets without going through U.S. Judge Alison Nathan of the Southern District of New York, who is responsible for enforcing the agreement. The SEC has maintained that it has a valid basis to investigate the tweets, citing rules that require companies to have policies that control how they disseminate information to shareholders.