Elon Musk has ‘no respect’ for US regulator

Elon Musk says he has “no respect” for the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) financial regulator.

He made the comment in an interview with news channel CBS, in which he also talked about his controversial behaviour on Twitter.

In September, the SEC decided to sue him for alleged securities fraud.

This followed a tweet in which Mr Musk wrote that he had secured funding to take Tesla off the stock market and make it a private company.

The SEC said the claim was “false and misleading”.

Mr Musk said he and Tesla had chosen to pay the $20m (£15m) settlement fine because while he did not respect the regulator, he did believe in the justice system.

As part of the settlement, he also had to step down as Tesla’s chairman and was told that his tweets should be monitored.

Days later, he took to Twitter to mock the regulator, describing it as the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission” and praising its “incredible work”.

In a newly released interview with CBS, he told reporter Lesley Stahl that he “preferred” not having a title but added that his tweets were still unsupervised.

“The only tweets that would have to be, say, reviewed would be if a tweet had a probability of causing a movement in the stock,” he said.

“Otherwise it’s, ‘Hello, First Amendment,’ he added, referring to the US right to free speech.

Elon Musk is well known for his fiery tweets. He described the social media platform as “a warzone”.

“I use my tweets to express myself. Some people use their hair, I use Twitter,” he said.