At the end of the Biden administration’s clock, the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk in federal court. The law of the hand is pretty straightforward. The complaint period is more complicated.

The SEC’s complaint centers on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter stock in early 2022. According to the complaint, Musk failed to notify the agency that he had acquired more than 5 percent of the company’s common stock within 10 calendar day. If true, that delay would violate federal securities laws. “As a result, Musk was able to continue buying shares at artificially low prices,” the SEC said accused“allowing him to underpay at least $150 million for the shares he bought after his beneficial ownership report.” The SEC asked for a jury trial.

This should all be pretty simple. “This is like a straightforward case about a clear violation of a well-established SEC rule,” said James Park, a UCLA School of Law professor who focuses on securities regulation and corporate law. You can file your papers within 10 days or you can’t; the SEC claims Musk didn’t. He acquired enough shares to cross that threshold on March 14 of that year, the agency said, and did not publicly disclose his ownership until April 4. March 24.)

And yet, it took almost three years for the SEC to bring a case. “The question is, why are they doing it now,” said David Rosenfeld, former cohead of the SEC’s New York enforcement office and now a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law. “The only plausible answer is that they want to get this done before the administration changes.” Rosenfeld says he did not thoroughly investigate the SEC’s complaint.

That change in the executive branch, which will take place in less than a week, creates a more favorable regulatory environment for Musk, who donated hundreds of millions of dollars of political action committees supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and is reportedly a close adviser to the president-elect during the transition. Current SEC chair Gary Gensler is likely to be replaced by Trump’s nominee, Paul Atkins, who is widely seen as supporting a lighter regulatory touch.

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, says he believes the complaint is a parting shot. “As the SEC retreated and stepped down, the SEC’s multiyear campaign of harassment against Mr. Musk culminated in the filing of a single-count ticky-tack complaint against Mr. Musk,” he wrote in a email.

While the filing comes before Trump’s inauguration on January 20, the investigation that led to this complaint has been years in the making. The agency must subpoena Musk in May 2023 to obtain his testimony in the investigation and SAYS that Musk canceled them two days before his scheduled testimony that September. A federal court lifted an earlier decision to compel him to testify in May of 2024; SEC lawyers flew in to interview him on September 10, but he raised them up once again to attend a SpaceX launch.