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By Mrinmay Dey
(Reuters) – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this week has reopened an investigation into Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink, according to a letter shared by Musk on Thursday on social media platform X.
The Dec. 12 letter from Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro and addressed to outgoing SEC Chair Gary Gensler also said that the agency had issued Musk a 48-hour settlement deadline to either accept a monetary payment or face charges over the probe into his $44 billion takeover of Twitter.
Musk has since renamed Twitter as ‘X.’
The settlement amount was not disclosed in the letter.
Musk has long sparred with the SEC and last year four lawmakers asked the commission to investigate whether Musk committed securities fraud by allegedly misleading investors about the safety of a brain implant developed by Neuralink.
How much traction the SEC would gain in any action against Musk is unclear.
The billionaire entrepreneur who also heads Tesla (NASDAQ:) and SpaceX is set to gain extraordinary influence after spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help Donald Trump win November’s presidential election. His companies are expected to be well insulated from regulation and enforcement measures.
Trump has also appointed Musk to a task force that plans a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. government.
Spiro wrote in the letter that he and Musk would not be “intimidated” by the SEC and that they reserved their legal rights.
The SEC and Neuralink did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours.
A federal judge in November rejected the SEC’s request to sanction Musk after he failed to appear for court-ordered testimony in relation to the Twitter takeover probe on whether Musk violated securities laws in 2022.
The commission had also sued Musk in 2018 over his Twitter posts about taking Tesla private. He settled that lawsuit by paying a $20 million fine, agreeing to let Tesla lawyers review some posts in advance and stepping down as chairman.
(This story has been corrected to say that the settlement demand was issued in connection with the SEC probe into Musk’s Twitter takeover, not Neuralink, in paragraph 2)
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