Musk charged with $7.5M insider trading on Tesla stock
Elon Musk had inside knowledge of a miss on production and delivery numbers that Tesla Inc. was facing when he sold more than $7.5 billion in stock in 2022, a shareholder in the electric vehicle maker claimed in a lawsuit.
Tesla’s chief executive officer had nonpublic information that Tesla would miss the fourth-quarter targets that year when he sold the shares, Tesla investor Michael Perry alleged in the suit, filed Thursday in Delaware Chancery Court.
By relying on that information when selling part of his Tesla stake for funds to bolster his buyout of the social media platform X, then known as Twitter, Musk “exploited his position at Tesla, and he breached his fiduciary duties” to the company and its shareholders, Perry said in the complaint.
“Musk profited from his misconduct and his exploitation of material and adverse inside information,” the suit alleges. Perry asked Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick to order Musk, the world’s second-richest person, to return the profit from his allegedly improper trading to the company.
Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, didn’t immediately return an email Friday seeking comment on the lawsuit.
It’s the latest dispute over Musk and his stock purchases, sales and talk. The suit comes in the same week the 52-year-old billionaire agreed to sit for a third round of questioning by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in its probe of his Twitter acquisition and whether he properly disclosed his initial stake in the company.
Earlier, after clashing with the SEC over a Twitter post he made about taking Tesla private, he incurred a fine and was forced to accept a “Twitter sitter,” a Tesla lawyer to screen his communications about the company.
In his lawsuit, Perry also names as
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