Elon Musk says in court that he doesn’t want to be CEO of any company and tries to walk back SEC insults
Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk attends the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China August 29, 2019.
Aly Song | Reuters
Elon Musk said in court Wednesday that he does not want to be the CEO of any company.
He recently acquired social media giant Twitter and appointed himself as the CEO, adding to his responsibilities as the CEO and “technoking” of electric vehicle maker Tesla, and CEO and CTO of the U.S. defense contractor SpaceX.
Musk also confirmed that the arrangement at Twitter is temporary. “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time,” he said.
Musk and Tesla are in the midst of a trial in Delaware over the 2018 CEO pay package the company granted him, an unparalleled compensation plan that has made Musk a centi-billionaire and the richest person on the planet.
Shareholder Richard J. Tornetta has sued Musk and Tesla alleging that the CEO compensation was excessive and that its authorization by the Tesla board amounted to a breach of its fiduciary duty.
Musk explained during the testimony that CEO is not necessarily an apt description for the work he says he does at his companies.
“At SpaceX it’s really that I’m responsible for the engineering of the rockets and Tesla for the technology in the car that makes it successful,” Musk said. “So, CEO is often viewed as somewhat of a business-focused role but in reality, my role is much more that of an engineer developing technology and making sure that we develop breakthrough technologies and that we have a team of incredible engineers who can achieve those goals.”
He also said, “It’s my experience that great engineers will only work for a great engineer. That is my first duty, not that of CEO.”
Attorneys for Tornetta asked Musk about a CNBC report that he had authorized at least 50 Tesla employees, mostly Autopilot engineers, to help with his work at Twitter, now that he owns the social media company.
Musk said he only called on Tesla employees to assist him at Twitter on a “voluntary basis” and to work “after hours” at Twitter. He said that no Tesla board member had called him to say it is not a good idea to use Tesla resources for one of his other, privately held companies.
“This was an after hours — just if you’re interested in evaluating, helping me evaluate Twitter engineering … that’d be nice. I think it lasted for a few days and it was over.”
When a lawyer asked if he thought it was a good idea to be using Tesla assets at Twitter, Musk responded, “I didn’t think of this as using Tesla assets.” He added, “There’s 120,000 people at the company. This is de minimis.”
With all his business commitments, Tesla has taken more of his time than anything in recent years, Musk said during the testimony.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs asked whether it was a good idea for Musk to strike a combative attitude towards regulators and specifically asked him about prior insults he lobbed at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“In general, I think the mission of the SEC is good but the question is whether that mission is being executed well,” he replied.
“In some cases I think it is not. The SEC fails to investigate things that they should and places far too much attention on things that are not relevant. The recent FTX thing I think is an example of that. Why was there no attention given to FTX? Investors lost billions. Yet the SEC continues to hound me despite shareholders being greatly rewarded. This makes no sense.”
In fact, the SEC and several other regulators have reportedly launched investigations into collapsed crypto firm FTX, but it’s not clear if those investigations started prior to the firm’s sudden bankruptcy last week.
What ‘SEC’ stands for
The SEC had charged Tesla and Musk for making “false and misleading” statements to shareholders when Musk said in tweets on Aug. 7, 2018, that he was thinking of taking the automaker private at $420 a share and had “funding secured.”
The price of Tesla shares jumped by over 6% after Musk’s tweets, and trading was halted the same day. Tesla shares remained volatile for weeks after the incident.
As part of a settlement agreement, Tesla and Musk agreed to pay a $20 million fine, Musk had to give up his role as chairman at Tesla for three years and agreed not to claim innocence or deny the SEC’s allegations. Musk and Tesla also committed to have the CEO’s tweets vetted by a securities lawyer before posting them if they contained material business information that could effect Tesla’s share price.
Tornetta’s lawyers asked Musk if he had a securities lawyer review all his tweets about Tesla and why he had been claiming innocence including in press interviews. Musk seemed to acknowledge that he doesn’t run all of his Tesla-related tweets by a lawyer first.
And he said, “The consent decree was made under duress. An agreement made under duress is not valid, as a foundation of law.”
At a time when Tesla shares were on a massive upswing, Musk had written in a tweet on July 2, 2020: “SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon’s.” The message was widely read as having a vulgar meaning and comprising a major insult to the agency.
On Wednesday in the Delaware court, attorneys asked him about this tweet and Musk claimed it had been widely misunderstood. The Tesla CEO said in court that he meant the initials to stand for “Save Elon’s Company” but the tweet was “interpreted differently.”
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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