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The SEC’s obsession with Elon Musk’s Twitter is still alive and well
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter feed was being questioned by SEC regulators last year, as the agency stated that his social media account had violated a court-ordered policy from a 2018 settlement that would require his Tweets to be pre-approved by company lawyers.
After Musk tweeted that he was interested in taking Tesla stock private at $420 a share in 2018, the SEC alleged that the CEO had committed fraud by communicating a potential buyout of the electric car company. The case was later settled by the SEC, Tesla, and Musk, who was required to pay $20 million in fines. Tesla also was required to pay a penalty of the same amount, and the settlement required Musk’s tweets to be examined and approved before he sent them out. Musk was also required to step down as Tesla’s chairman, a position that he would be ineligible to be re-elected to for three years, the SEC settlement said.
Musk paid the penalties and stepped down as the Chairman of the Board. However, in an interview with 60 Minutes, he admitted that he was not having his tweets regulated by company attorneys and that the First Amendment protected his speech. “Twitter is a warzone,” Musk said. “I do not respect the SEC,” he also said in the interview.
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018
Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that it has uncovered several documents from the SEC that indicated that Musk violated the court-ordered pre-approval of his tweets last year. The SEC told Tesla in May 2020 that it had failed “to enforce these procedures and controls despite repeated violations by Mr. Musk.” A former SEC Senior Official named Steven Buchholz signed the letter and stated that Tesla failed to oblige by the settlement that was agreed to.
The WSJ said it obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Musk’s Twitter activity was difficult to regulate. The SEC asked a New York City court to consider holding Musk in contempt of court in February 2019, but the Judge said that the dispute needed to be settled, and the SEC agreed to modify the terms of the settlement. Instead, certain topics would be required for pre-approval and included anything regarding production figures, Tesla’s financials, and potential business ventures. Musk tweeted an update in July 2019 that updated his followers on his expectations for Tesla’s Solar Roof production rate and hoped that the company could manufacture 1,000 units per week by the end of the year.
Spooling up production line rapidly. Hoping to manufacture ~1000 solar roofs/week by end of this year.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2019
Tesla told the SEC that the tweet didn’t require approval because it was “wholly aspirational,” meaning that it was just a hope of Musk’s and that production wouldn’t necessarily reach that level. It was a goal, not an update.
Musk then tweeted that “Tesla’s stock price is too high imo” in May 2020, another tweet that put the SEC into the realm of questioning Musk’s Twitter usage. According to the WSJ, Tesla once again didn’t review the tweet because it was Musk’s opinion.
Tesla stock price is too high imo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020
In response to Tesla’s decision not to review the tweet, the SEC wrote (via Wall Street Journal):
“In the face of Mr. Musk’s repeated refusals to submit his covered written communications on Twitter to Tesla for pre-approval, we are very concerned by Tesla’s repeated determinations that there have been no policy violations because of purported carve-outs.”
Tesla’s attorneys said later that month that regulators have attempted to “harass Tesla and silence Mr. Musk” with repeated investigations.
Attorney Alex Spiro was concerned that the SEC was simply targeting Musk. “The serial nature of these investigations leaves us gravely concerned that the SEC is targeting Mr. Musk for an improper purpose,” Spiro wrote.
The SEC requested that Tesla reconsider its positions in the investigations to “prevent further shareholder harm.”
A June 2020 letter from the SEC said:
“We urge the company to reconsider its positions in this matter by acting to implement and enforce disclosure controls and procedures…to prevent further shareholder harm.”
The rivalry between the SEC and Musk continues, it seems, with no real end in sight. Spiro’s claims that the SEC is targeting Musk align with the fact that the agency has repeatedly gone after the Tesla CEO with the basis that he is manipulating stock prices or affecting shareholder integrity. In reality, Musk’s ability to tweet is protected by his First Amendment right, and a shareholder decides to buy or sell a stock, not Musk.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, or be sure to email me at joey@teslarati.com or on Twitter @KlenderJoey.
Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.
Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.
@wholemars Just discussions, but something may come of it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.
Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.
Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.
Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.
Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.
Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.
If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.
Tesla’s early strategy for charging units operating within its Robotaxi fleet reveals that the company surely has not lost any of that scrappy DNA that took it from an unlikely success story to the most valuable carmaker in the world.
An observer at a Tesla Supercharger in Austin spotted ten total Robotaxi vehicles arrive: one Cybercab and nine Model Y units. A Tesla employee was waiting at the lot and allowed each unit to park itself; every car that arrived had nobody in it.
Tesla wins FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging system
The Tesla employee would walk around and plug each car in, adjusting the parking if needed:
So look at what I found. This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger. Here is a driverless Cybercab showing up with no one in it. There are 9 other Model Ys that showed up too. A Tesla employee is walking around and plugging each of them in. She also moves the cars if they are not positioned well enough to charge. I love this process. One person charges multiple robotaxis at once
— Abhimanyu Yadav (@WorldlyReviewer) October 3, 2026
It’s a very interesting strategy, but extremely understandable at this early point in the Robotaxi program. It’s only been out for about 15 months, and Cybercab just entered the fleet in early September.
On top of that, Tesla is still working tirelessly on its wireless charging apparatus, and a new patent was just published regarding that product last week.
However, this is just another example of how Tesla still has plenty of that scrappy DNA leftover from the “production hell” days, when CEO Elon Musk slept on the floor of the factory, employees were working crazy hours, Tesla was building Sprung Structures to build cars in, and the company was tiptoeing on the brink of bankruptcy.
@Teslarati Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For now, Tesla is utilizing a simple system for recharging its ride-hailing vehicles, and that is a Tesla employee doing it manually until another solution presents itself. Sure, it’s not the most high-tech thing, and it certainly is not what people might have expected at this point in time, but it works, and it’s keeping the entire suite running.
Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi service hours by pushing the time back by one hour, keeping the ride-hailing service operational until 11 p.m., one hour later than previously.
CEO Elon Musk confirmed the change and offered a specific reason the expansion has been gradual: the system still needs to reliably avoid small pets that are difficult to see after dark, as they commonly blend into the color of the road, especially when they’re grey.
The latest adjustment restores only a fraction of the operating window the service once held. When paid Robotaxi rides began in Austin on June 22, 2025, vehicles ran from 6 a.m. to midnight.
In September 2025, Tesla lengthened the day to a 2 a.m. close, producing a 20-hour window that stayed in place for most of the following year. By early August of this year, the cutoff had already been pulled back; an August 26 update formalized hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. across Austin and several other markets.
The October move to 11 p.m. therefore leaves the Austin day one hour shorter than the original launch schedule and three hours shorter than the 2025 peak.
Musk addressed the constraint directly after the announcement. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” he wrote. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
Robotaxi operating hours moved from 10pm to 11pm.
The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The example points to a low-contrast perception problem in which a small animal can blend into the road surface under limited lighting.
Tesla’s vehicles rely on cameras and neural-network processing rather than lidar; Musk has previously argued that advanced vision software can extract useful information even in low light by analyzing photon counts, but the pet-detection case remains the stated limiter in later hours.
The modest schedule change arrives alongside faster growth in the purpose-built Cybercab fleet. Texas registration data tracked by observers showed the Austin Cybercab count rising sharply in recent weeks, reaching 169 vehicles after more than 100 were added in a short span.
Tesla has indicated that a broader shift toward 24-hour operation is tied to the upcoming FSD v15 software release expected this month on Robotaxi vehicles. Until that capability is validated for the edge cases Musk described, the company continues to add service time incrementally rather than jumping straight to overnight coverage.
The one-hour extension gives Austin riders a later option for evening trips while the underlying detection work continues.
Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner
Tesla reveals early Robotaxi charging strategy, showing scrappy DNA
