In the United States, a judge has refused to impose sanctions on billionaire Elon Musk for missing a meeting with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to watch the launch of one of his rockets, UNN reports citing Bloomberg.
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U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said on Friday that there was no need to impose sanctions on Musk, as he had already agreed to reimburse the SEC for $2,923 to cover airfare for three of the agency's lawyers in September. Corley noted that Musk finally met with SEC lawyers to testify on October 3.
The regulator is investigating Musk's purchase of Twitter Inc. shares and statements about his investments before he spent $44 billion in 2022 to buy the social media platform, which he later renamed X.
Musk has had a strained relationship with the SEC for years, starting when the SEC sued him for securities fraud in 2018 after he tweeted that Tesla Inc. was going private. During the Twitter investigation, Corley repeatedly ordered Musk to cooperate with the agency after he initially gave two interviews but refused to participate in the third round of questioning.
Musk's lawyer, Alex Spiro, argued that the billionaire's failure to appear at the September deposition was justified because, as the head of SpaceX, he had urgent commitments to travel to Florida to launch a rocket from Cape Canaveral as part of a commercial space mission.
The SEC called on Corley to sanction Musk to remind him that failing to comply with its order was not a "trivial matter," but Spiro argued that his client's voluntary offer to reimburse the agency for $2,923 was sufficient.
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