Tech mogul Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual with a net worth currently estimated at $659 billion, agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty to settle an SEC lawsuit accusing him of failing to properly disclose stock he was amassing in Twitter in violation of securities laws.
Musk consented to the settlement “without admitting or denying the allegations,” according to the SEC’s legal filing in the U.S. District Court for the DC District, entered Monday (May 4). The settlement also “permanently restrains and enjoins” Musk’s trust “from violating Section 13(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.”
The SEC sued Musk in January 2025, accusing him of failing to properly disclose his initial purchases of Twitter in early 2022. The suit alleged Musk’s undisclosed stock purchases cost other Twitter shareholders at least $150 million because they sold shares at lower prices without knowing that Musk was amassing shares in the company.
The SEC’s lawsuit alleged that Musk was required to file a “beneficial ownership” form with the regulatory agency to disclose that he had amassed more than 5% of shares in the company by March 24, 2022. The SEC complaint stated that Musk began buying up Twitter shares early in the year. By March 14, Musk owned more than 5% of the company’s outstanding stock, and thus was required to disclose the size of his stake within 10 days.
On April 25, 2022, Musk announced an agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion — and he then spent several months trying to back out of the pact. After Twitter sued Musk, seeking to enforce the original terms of the merger agreement, he ultimately agreed to complete the deal at the original purchase price and the deal closed in October of that year. In July 2023, he renamed the company X.
Separately, Musk is facing a class-action civil suit in California filed on behalf of Twitter shareholders. In March 2026, a jury in the case found that he had artificially driven down the price of Twitter‘s stock in 2022 with tweets claiming the social-media company had underreported how many fake and spam accounts were on its platform, a federal jury found. Musk’s lawyers said they will appeal the verdict.
Earlier this year, Musk’s SpaceX bought his artificial-intelligence company, xAI, which had previously acquired X.
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From Variety US