(PresidentialHill.com)- In a recent tweet, Mark Cuban suggested that Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter is Musk’s way of “f**king with” the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Cuban tweeted last Thursday that filing with the SEC allows Musk to say he wants to take Twitter private as a way to increase the stock price before selling his 9 percent stake in the company. As “proof” of his theory, Cuban notes Musk saying in 2018 that he secured the money to take Tesla private.
In that tweet, Musk said he had secured the funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share. The tweet, sent in the middle of a trading day, caused the Tesla stock price to increase 11 percent to $379.57 a share.
After the incident, the SEC launched an investigation into Musk and Tesla. Eventually, they reached a settlement in which Musk agreed to step down as chairman of the board and pay a $20 million fine. Tesla agreed to pay an additional $20 million fine. Musk also had to agree to pre-clear any tweets about Tesla’s stock price with in-house counsel.
Since then, Musk has been very vocal about his disdain for the Security and Exchange Commission.
While speaking at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver last week, Musk described the SEC as “those bastards” when he recounted the settlement over his 2018 tweet.
Musk said that he did secure the funding to take Tesla private as he said in the tweet, but the SEC “pursued the active public investigation nonetheless.”
He told the conference that he felt forced to settle with the SEC because banks were threatening to stop providing capital to Tesla if he refused to settle. Being faced with the threat of Tesla’s bankruptcy, Musk said, is “like having a gun to your child’s head.” So to save Tesla, Musk said he was “forced to admit that I lied.”
