Is Elon Musk's time as Tesla CEO nearing the end of the road?

ELON Musk could be forgiven for feeling like the walls are closing in on him.

And no, it’s not because he just smoked a joint, but because US law agencies have stepped up their attack on the billionaire entrepreneur.

The Tesla CEO has been officially sued by the US securities regulators and it could spell the end of the road for the 47-year-old as the boss of the world’s most famous — and valuable — electric car company.

The US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a complaint against Musk accusing him of securities fraud for making a series of “false and misleading” tweets about potentially taking Tesla private.

In August, Musk tweeted that he was thinking of taking the company private at $420 per share, claiming he had secured funding for such a deal. Even for an increasingly eccentric and unorthodox CEO like Musk, this was an unusual way of doing things.

Typically a company would need to issue a halt on the trading of its shares before suggesting such a dramatic change to the company’s future.

Many on Wall Street couldn’t believe what he had done and some called it blatant stock manipulation (particularly as it hurts the growing number of short sellers betting against the company’s share price).

True to form, he even included a sly joke in the process (but it probably won’t help his case).

Musk arrived at the $420 per share number because it was roughly a 20 per cent premium on the current share price at the time and because he wanted to make a weed joke to impress his girlfriend.

According to the SEC suit, “He had recently learned about the number’s significance in marijuana culture and thought his girlfriend ‘would find it funny, which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price’.”

His girlfriend at the time was alternative musician Grimes.

The SEC was quick to announce a probe into the matter. But most extraordinary, this month the US Department of Justice revealed it was running its own, potentially criminal, probe into the tweets.

The SEC is calling BS on the fact that Musk ever had funding and the Wall Street Watchdog wants to prevent him from being the CEO of a public company in the future.

The complaint filed in the US District Court in Manhattan says that Mr Musk had not discussed or confirmed key deal terms including price with any funding source.

The commission is asking the court for an order that would stop Musk from being “an officer or director” of any public company.

“Musk made his false and misleading public statements about taking Tesla private using his mobile phone in the middle of the active trading day,” the SEC said in the complaint. “He did not discuss the content of the statements with anyone else prior to publishing them to his over 22 million Twitter followers and anyone else with access to the internet.”

The statements, the complaint said “were premised on a long series of baseless assumptions and were contrary to facts that Musk knew.”

The SEC also seeks an order enjoining Musk from making false and misleading statements along with repayment of any gains as well as civil penalties.

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