SEC sues Elon Musk, alleging failure to properly disclose Twitter ownership

Published

10 months ago

January 14, 2025

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Beata Zawrzel | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The SEC filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Tuesday, alleging the billionaire committed securities fraud in 2022 by failing to disclose his ownership in Twitter and buying shares at “artificially low prices.”

Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, purchased Twitter for $44 billion, later changing the name of the social network to X. Prior to the acquisition he’d built up a position in the company of greater than 5%, which would’ve required disclosing his holding to the public.

According to the SEC complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Musk withheld that material information, “allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million for shares he purchased after his financial beneficial ownership report was due.”

The SEC had been investigating whether Musk, or anyone else working with him, committed securities fraud in 2022 as the Tesla CEO sold shares in his car company and shored up his stake in Twitter ahead of his leveraged buyout. Musk said in a post on X last month that the SEC issued a “settlement demand,” pressuring him to agree to a deal including a fine within 48 hours or “face charges on numerous counts” regarding the purchase of shares.

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, said in an emailed statement that the action is an admission by the SEC that “they cannot bring an actual case.” He added that Musk “has done nothing wrong” and called the suit a “sham” and the result of a “multi-year campaign of harassment,” culminating in a “single-count ticky tak complaint.”

Musk is just a week away from having a potentially influential role in government, as President-elect Donald Trump’s second term begins on Jan. 20. Musk, who was a major financial backer of Trump in the latter stages of the campaign, is poised to lead an advisory group that will focus in part on reducing regulations, including those that affect Musk’s various companies.

In July, Trump vowed to fire SEC chairman Gary Gensler. After Trump’s election victory, Gensler announced that he would be resigning from his post instead.

In a separate civil lawsuit concerning the Twitter deal, the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System sued Musk, accusing him of deliberately concealing his progressive investments in the social network and intent to buy the company. The pension fund’s attorneys argued that Musk, by failing to clearly disclose his investments, had influenced other shareholders’ decisions and put them at a disadvantage.

The SEC said that Musk crossed the 5% ownership threshold in March 2022 and would have been required to disclose his holdings by March 24.

“On April 4, 2022, eleven days after a report was due, Musk finally publicly disclosed his beneficial ownership in a report with the SEC, disclosing that he had acquired over nine percent of Twitter’s outstanding stock,” the complaint says. “That day, Twitter’s stock price increased more than 27% over its previous day’s closing price.”

The SEC alleges that Musk spent over $500 million purchasing more Twitter shares during the time between the required disclosure and the day of his actual filing. That enabled him to buy stock from the “unsuspecting public at artificially low prices,” the complaint says. He “underpaid” Twitter shareholders by over $150 million during that period, according to the SEC.

In the complaint, the SEC is seeking a jury trial and asks that Musk be forced to “pay disgorgement of his unjust enrichment” as well as a civil penalty.

This story is developing.

Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

11 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: