It seems that Elon Musk does not like to be investigated, and that is willing to use the pressure force of Tesla and SpaceX to respond to said actions. Something that we can doubt about whether it is more or less legal, of course, but that on a personal level shows us what kind of person we are talking about (if we were not already clear about it). And yes, without a doubt, we are talking about a person with enough lights, yes, but also with not a few shadows.
And it is that, as we can read in The Wall Street Journal, a Tesla lawyer asked the Cooley LLP law firm tothat he fired one of his lawyers orOtherwise, he would face the risk of losing the two companies run by the controversial tycoon as a client.
The lawyer Tesla wanted Cooley LLP to fire previously worked at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The lawyer interviewed Musk in the agency’s investigation into some of Musk’s statements regarding Tesla’s actions. The investigation led to a settlement under which Musk and Tesla agreed to pay a $20 million fine each and Musk agreed to step down for three years as chairman of Tesla.
The good news is that, despite the pressure, the firm opted to keep the lawyer on the payroll, instead of giving in to the pressure exerted by Musk’s environment to expel him from the office, although that has already cost him the loss of SpaceX as a client, something that at least in principle would not have happened with Tesla yet. However, the company has also reacted by hiring another lawyer who previously also worked at the US regulator.
Musk’s showdown with regulators It is neither something new nor is it limited to a specific cause. On the contrary, there are already several occasions in which he and his companies have had to face investigations of various kinds. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has investigated the possible liability of Tesla car accidents in which driver assistance systems could be wholly or partially responsible.
In this case, Tesla and Musk accused Missy Cummings -a professor at Duke University, an expert in automated systems, a former Navy combat pilot-, an advisor to said commission of inquiry, with Musk himself tweeting against her and stating that he was an extremely biased person when it came to Tesla, something that led the NHTSA to ask Cummings to recuse himself from the Tesla-specific matters.
