Elon is back on the Twitter train and causing chaos yet again.

Last week the Tesla CEO – who has been banned from tweeting about anything that can impact markets and/or his publicly traded company without approval from Tesla – just couldn’t help himself.

Mashable writes that the ‘Twitter ban’ came about in a settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year over his now infamous “funding secured” tweet.

And yet here we are. The following was tweeted last week:

Despite the attempt to correct the original tweet with two follow-ups a few hours later, the SEC is asking a judge to hold Elon in contempt for suggesting that Tesla would make 500 000 cars in 2019.

Here’s Ars Technica:

On Wednesday, the agency wrote letters to Musk and Tesla asking whether Musk had gotten his tweet pre-approved as required by the settlement. In a Friday response, Tesla’s lawyer admitted that he hadn’t.

Instead, the attorney argued that Musk didn’t need pre-approval, because Musk was merely repeating information Tesla put out previously. Specifically, Tesla’s most recent earnings releasestated that “we are targeting annualized Model 3 output in excess of 500,000 units sometime between Q4 of 2019 and Q2 of 2020.”

…But in the SEC’s view this isn’t good enough. What Musk’s tweet actually said—500,000 cars produced in 2019—wasn’t accurate. Moreover, Tesla’s previous guidance didn’t even say that it would achieve an annualized rate by the end of 2019—it said this milestone would be achieved sometime betweenQ4 2019 and Q2 2020.

That said, it’s going to take more than the threat of court action to keep Elon down. Not only is he still tweeting, but he also tweeted the following meme as news broke about the SEC’s actions:

Sure. That seems like an appropriate response. Maybe he’s on the weed again.

The original lawsuit against Musk sought to bar him as CEO of Tesla, but it was overturned.

If he’s not careful, that could be back on the table.

[sources:mashable&arstechnica]