Less than a week after Tesla Inc.'s general counsel departed two months into the job, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has called for the company's chief executive officer, Elon Musk, to be held in contempt of court.

In a motion filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York on Monday, the SEC alleged Musk violated a settlement with the agency by not seeking approval before posting a Feb. 19 tweet claiming Tesla would ”make around 500k [cars] in 2019.” Four hours later, Musk tweeted again, clarifying the Palo Alto-based company aimed to produce 10,000 cars a week this year and complete 400,000 deliveries.

Tesla's leaders had agreed to prescreen any Musk tweet related to the company and its shareholders in a 2018 settlement with the SEC, after the CEO tweeted he'd secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share.

“Musk did not seek or receive pre-approval prior to publishing this tweet, which was inaccurate and disseminated to over 24 million people,” SEC representatives wrote in a filing signed by Cheryl Crumpton, an SEC supervisory assistant chief litigation counsel with the agency's division of enforcement. “Musk has thus violated the court's final judgment by engaging in the very conduct that the pre-approval provision of the final judgment was designed to prevent.”

According to the SEC, Musk admitted his Feb. 19 tweets were not pre-approved but that he didn't know they would need approval, because Tesla's production estimates were previously disclosed. Tesla declined to comment.

Bradley Bondi, a partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel who represented Tesla in communications with the SEC, said in a Feb. 20 email to Crumpton that Musk's tweeted production estimates “had been communicated previously in pre-approved public updates” and on a company earnings call. He cited a January 2019 announcement from Tesla that publicly stated a company goal to “produce 10,000 vehicles per week on a sustained basis.”

“Although the 7:15 PM EST tweet was not individually pre-approved, Mr. Musk believed that the substance had already been appropriately vetted, pre-approved, and publicly disseminated. Moreover, the tweet was made outside of NASDAQ trading hours,” Bondi wrote in his email to Crumpton.

Crumpton's letter states “a violation of a court order need not be willful in order to find contempt.” Neither she nor Bondi immediately responded to request for comment.

Musk's latest string of controversial tweets coincides with the departure of Dane Butswinkas as general counsel. On Feb. 20, Butswinkas announced he was leaving Tesla after two months as GC. Longtime Tesla in-house counsel Jonathan Chang replaced him. A top Tesla securities lawyer, Philip Rothenberg, also left the company recently, moving to hospitality startup Sonder as GC in November.

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