Elon Musk has cleared the SEC's lawsuit over his 2022 Twitter buyout with a $1.5 million payment, while Forbes pegs his net worth at about $790 billion. For context, that's like someone with a $79,000 salary paying a 15-cent fine.
The settlement still needs sign-off from the judge in the case. The bigger story is what it does and doesn't change about how Musk operates.
Before Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022, he was buying up shares of the public company on the open market. Once an investor crosses 5% ownership of a public company, U.S. rules say they have to file a public disclosure within 10 calendar days.
The SEC said Musk filed late, and that delay, the agency argued, let him buy more shares at "artificially low prices" before the market knew he was the buyer. The agency sued him last year and signaled in a court filing last month that the two sides were close to a resolution.
Musk's revocable trust will now pay the $1.5 million fine, pending the judge's sign-off. Musk's attorney Alex Spiro called it a win, saying a "trust vehicle has agreed to a small fine for being late on one filing."
This isn't Musk's first SEC settlement, since in 2018 he and Tesla each paid $20 million in fines tied to his "funding secured" tweet about taking Tesla private. That deal also forced Musk to step down as Tesla's chairman for a stretch, with a revised consent decree signed the following year.
Musk has said publicly more than once that he doesn't respect the SEC, and a $1.5 million result here probably doesn't change that. He later renamed Twitter to X, then merged it with his AI company xAI before folding the whole package into SpaceX earlier this year.
In a separate class action, a federal jury in California ruled in March that Musk misled Twitter investors during the runup to the buyout, and his lawyers plan to appeal. That case could carry a heavier price tag than the SEC settlement.
Musk is currently in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, in a separate trial against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, where Musk took the stand last week. The case dates to 2024 and centers on OpenAI's plan to convert from a nonprofit, which Musk says breaks the original deal he helped fund.
Musk testified Tuesday through Thursday in the OpenAI case, with closing arguments still ahead. A $1.5 million fine won't change how Musk runs his companies, but the SEC closing one of its open Musk files clears the agency's docket.
That frees Musk to focus on courtrooms he chose.