Tesla shareholders on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the electric carmaker's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, accusing him of making billions of dollars in profits by selling Tesla shares using inside information.
Tesla shareholders asked the court in a lawsuit filed against Elon Musk yesterday to order the Tesla CEO to return what they called illegal profits he received to shareholders.
The new lawsuit comes two days before Tesla shareholders are due to vote on whether to reinstate Elon Musk's $56 billion pay package, which a Delaware Chancery judge had ruled invalid in January after finding that Musk had improperly controlled the operation.
The first lawsuit, filed by the employee pension fund, accused Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk, a Tesla executive, of selling a combined $30 billion of the company's shares between late 2021 and the end of 2022, taking advantage of news that then sent the stock tumbling before the news was made public.
The Rhode Island Employees' Retirement Fund holds about 140,000 shares of Tesla stock, which, based on Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) closing price in U.S. trading on Tuesday, is worth about $24 million.
A similar lawsuit filed late last month in the same Delaware Chancery Court by Michael Burry, also a Tesla shareholder, also accused Musk of insider trading when he sold more than $7.5 billion worth of Tesla shares in late 2022.
Elon Musk is currently facing a regulatory investigation to determine whether he violated federal Securities and Exchange Commission laws and regulations in 2022 when he purchased shares in Twitter to take it over.
