Will the real Elon Musk please stand up?
The Tesla CEO evoked rapper Eminem in his legal battle to "seize the memes of production" on Twitter from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which requires his tweets to be reviewed and pre-approved.
“I mean we’re basically identical – a few differences maybe …” Musk said on Twitter, though it’s unclear if the comment had been approved.
In a court filing this week, lawyers compared Mr Musk’s treatment by the SEC to the treatment of The Real Slim Shady by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which fined radio stations $7,000 for playing the profanity-laden song two decades ago.
“The [SEC] won’t let me be or let me be me so let me see / They tried to shut me down…" the court filing said, replacing FCC with SEC in the lyrics of Eminem’s follow-up single, Without Me.
The SEC was awarded a consent decree in 2018 after Mr Musk tweeted he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which he told investigators at the time was a weed joke for his girlfriend Grimes.
Lawyers are asking the court to quash the order, and a subsequent SEC subpoena to determine whether Mr Musk is receiving pre-approval for his tweets, based on the FCC ruling that noted the "critical constitutional limitation" of the First Amendment.
The timing of the filing in the US Southern District of New York coincided with Mr Musk hinting at plans to build a social media alternative that focuses on freedom of speech.
On Saturday, he tweeted a poll asking if Twitter rigorously adheres to the principle that "free speech is essential to a functioning democracy", saying the "consequences" of the poll would be important.
With more than 2 million responses, 70 per cent of people believe Twitter does not adhere to First Amendment principles.
He followed up on Sunday saying he has given "serious thought" to building a new platform, which was floated as an open-source algorithm where the top priority is adhering to free speech.
"Seize the memes of production," he added in a separate tweet.
A new social media platform could be another way of challenging the authority of the SEC, which received the decree after his "$420" tweets in 2018 and received a subpoena to determine his compliance after Musk tweeted a poll in November 2021 asking if he should sell 10 per cent of his Tesla stock.
According to the legal filing, the SEC was acting in "bad faith" by issuing a subpoena for documents between Mr Musk and Tesla’s legal counsel related to the tweet, which could not happen "without testing the outer bounds of attorney-client privilege".
When contacted, the SEC did not respond to whether they tried to shut Mr Musk down, or if they let he be thee.
