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Shares of Twitter soared by more than 25% in pre-market trading on news that Elon Musk took a 9.2% passive stake in the social media platform.

 On March 26th Musk was tweeting out a poll questioning if Twitter “adhered” to free speech principles. And hinting he might create a new platform of his own.

 But Musk had already bought into Twitter.  According to the 13G SEC filing, Musk purchased on March 14, 2022.

Elon Musk and the SEC feud

Tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon have been accused by conservatives and free speech advocates of banning users with unpopular views.

Elon Musk has 80.2 million Twitter followers, and the SEC believes they should have control of what he tweets.

They are definitely investigating Musk’s right-to-tweet. And insist they have the legal authority to subpoena Tesla and Elon Musk about all his tweets. 

As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has gotten in trouble for Tweeting.

Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed papers in Manhattan federal court that noted the Tesla CEO was bound by a 2018 agreement. He was supposed to get permission, in advance, if he wished to post certain tweets.

Tesla said that this past November, the SEC sought “information on our governance processes around compliance” with a September 2018 settlement between the company and the regulatory agency.

The subpoena was issued 10 days after Musk triggered a stock sell-off when he asked his Twitter followers if he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla.

Tesla’s stock price dipped by 16% over two days following his tweet.

The SEC forced Musk to step down as chairman and to appoint independent members to the company’s board of directors to censor his tweets. The SEC said Musk had to “establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee [his] communications.”

He also agreed to pay $20 million while Tesla kicked in another $20 million in fines. The SEC said Musk agreed to “establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee [his] communications.”

Musk attorney Alex Spiro claimed that the SEC has used the court agreement “to trample on Mr. Musk’s First Amendment rights and to impose prior restraints on his speech.”

Elon Musk Twitter deal: investor activist  

Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said last year that his company erred when it censored a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks leading up to the presidential election.