Elon Musk has asked a federal judge to throw out a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit accusing him of waiting too long to disclose his multibillion-dollar stake in Twitter, before he bought the platform, arguing the regulator is targeting him for political reasons.
In an Aug. 28 filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Musk’s lawyers said the SEC is pursuing him not for the substance of the violation but because of his outspoken criticism of regulators and government “overreach.”
“The Commission’s selective enforcement against Mr. Musk—seeking monetary relief more than 1,500 times larger than the relief imposed on similarly situated individuals in similar cases—reveals an agency targeting an individual for his protected criticism of government overreach,” the filing states….