(Reuters) – A Tesla (NASDAQ:) shareholder filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing Chief Executive Elon Musk of insider trading when he sold more than $7.5 billion of shares in the electric vehicle maker at the end of 2022, saying the billionaire entrepreneur sold shares before potentially disappointing. Production and supply data have been made public.
Shareholder Michael Perry, in a lawsuit filed in Delaware Chancery Court, said Tesla’s stock price plummeted after the company’s fourth-quarter results were released on Jan. 2, 2023, and said Musk “improperly benefited” by about $3 billion. dollars from insider information. profit.
“Musk took advantage of his position at Tesla and breached his fiduciary duties to Tesla,” says the lawsuit, which asks the court to order Musk to return profits made from the transactions.
According to the lawsuit, Musk sold the shares on various dates in November and December 2022.
The lawsuit also accuses Tesla directors of breaching their fiduciary duties by allowing Musk to sell the shares.
Musk and Tesla did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
In the lawsuit, Perry said Musk, who said in 2022 that demand for Tesla vehicles was “excellent,” learned of the lower-than-expected numbers in mid-November after gaining access to real-time data and sold his shares before how the information was made public.
Tesla shares fell sharply after news of car discounts sparked concerns about demand and the release of data in January.
“Had (Musk) delayed these sales until the publication of material adverse news… his sales would have generated less than 55% of the amounts received from his sales in November and December 2022,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit is the latest legal headache for Musk.
It comes as Musk faces opposition from some Tesla shareholders, who are set to vote June 13 on whether to ratify his $56 billion pay package that a Delaware judge threw out in January because she found he did not control the process correctly.
Tesla is registered in the state of Delaware.
Musk is also at the center of a regulatory investigation to determine whether he violated federal securities laws in 2022 when he bought shares of the social network Twitter, which he later renamed X. Musk said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was trying to ” persecute” him through unfounded investigations.
Musk and the top US markets regulator have been in a years-long feud dating back to 2018, when he tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private.
A separate shareholder lawsuit accuses Musk of defrauding X investors by delaying disclosure of his stake in the social network to accumulate shares at lower prices.