Sina US Stock News Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (Securities and Exchange Commission) told the judge that they needed more time to resolve the legal dispute over Musk's Twitter usage habits.
Musk and the SEC said in a joint letter to US District Judge Alison Nathan (Alison Nathan) that earlier this week, they failed to reach an agreement to resolve a legal dispute over how Musk published news about his electric vehicle company.
The two sides said they were unable to reach an agreement before the April 18 deadline set by Nathan and requested that they be allowed to submit reports on or before April 25.
According to Reuters, court documents show that Judge Nathan approved a request jointly submitted by Musk and the SEC to extend the time period for reaching an agreement by another week.
On April 4, Judge Nathan gave Musk two weeks to resolve their differences, dismissing the SEC's request to detain him for contempt of court. Musk is charged with violating a securities fraud settlement agreement reached in October last year.
US Judge Nathan said she is “seriously concerned that no matter what decisions I make here, this issue will not be resolved.” Nathan ordered both parties to “take a deep breath and put on the pants of reason” and come up with a solution.
Now all parties are asking for another week to resolve this issue.
The controversy stemmed from Musk's tweet in February this year, which included Tesla's production predictions. At first, Musk wrote to millions of fans on Twitter that the electric car manufacturer would produce around 500,000 cars in 2019. Subsequently, he tweeted that he meant that Tesla's annual production would peak at 500,000 vehicles, but it is expected that this year's production will still be around 400,000 vehicles.
The initial tweet was enough to convince the SEC to accuse Musk of flouting an agreement reached last October. Musk tweeted last year that he had “received funding” to privatize Tesla at a price of $420 per share. As part of the settlement, Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million in fines.
Former SEC prosecutor Elliot Lutzker (Elliot Lutzker) told CNBC earlier this month that he doesn't expect the SEC to try to remove Musk from his position as CEO, but he believes the settlement agreement will involve fines of more than $20 million. (Zhang Ning)