In 2022, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened a probe into Elon Musk, to investigate whether the billionaire and his brother, Kimbal Musk, had violated insider trading rules, when the latter sold $108 million of shares in Tesla one day before the former sent the EV maker’s stock plummeting after he asked in a poll on then-Twitter if he should sell 10% of his stake in the company.
Then, in a 2023 lawsuit, Musk was accused of market manipulation and insider trading by dogecoin investors. The suit alleged that Musk had purposefully boosted the coin’s value through “publicity stunts,” such as changing Twitter’s logo to the dogecoin Shiba Inu, only to then sell $124 million worth of the cryptocurrency.
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This time, however, the call is coming from inside the house.
On Thursday, May 30, 2024, Tesla shareholder Michael Perry filed a lawsuit in the state of Delaware, alleging that Musk sold more than $7.5 billion worth of Tesla stock in November and December of 2022 in an insider trading move, Bloomberg reports.
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The suit alleges that Musk was in possession of and motivated by non-public information about the company’s fourth-quarter deliveries, when he sold the shares.
According to Forbes, Musk allegedly profited approximately $3 billion from his sales. Had he waited until the non-public information was made public, the suit claims he would have made less than 55% of what he ultimately realized.
After the allegations were made public, Tesla’s stock took a slight dip on Friday, May 31, bounced back in the early hours of trading on Monday, June 3, before taking yet another moderate dip in the afternoon.
