Elon Musk straight-up taunts the SEC on Twitter

Will Elon Musk ever learn? Even after being fined $20 million for a single tweet and sued for fraud … he’s back.

Tesla CEO Musk may have settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over that August tweet claiming he had the funds to take his electric car company private, but that hasn’t stopped the eccentric billionaire from tweeting. 

And he isn’t just tweeting silly cat pics. No, he’s going for the jugular with taunting tweets about the very agency that investigated, sued, and then settled with him for fraud. 

A Thursday afternoon tweet (exactly a week after the SEC sued him) sarcastically praised the SEC’s name — changing it to “Shortseller Enrichment Commission.” Hey, the “C” is still the same.

About 40 minutes later, he doubled-down on the tweet and apologized for the typo in the original post.

Part of Musk’s settlement from last week is an agreement to reign in his tweeting habits. Per the terms of the settlement: “Tesla will establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications.” Musk must also step down as chairman of the board (he gets to stay on as CEO), and in addition to his penalty of $20 million, Tesla has been fined another $20 million. 

It seems that the committee will start overseeing things in a few months, so we have about 80 days remaining of potential Twitter adventures with Musk.

But Musk and Tesla might not even be out of the woods yet. A Fox Business Network scoop reports that the SEC is looking into mis-statements from Tesla about its Model 3 production goals.

The SEC declined to comment. Just like they declined to comment on the mocking tweet from Musk.