Billionaire Elon Musk’s boasts on Twitter that he had “funding secured” to take his electric vehicle company Tesla private—made after believing himself the target of unfair practices by short-selling traders—has landed him in hot water with federal regulators and it could lead to his departure from top positions at any of his publicly traded companies.

In a suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Musk should have known that his Aug. 7 tweets about potentially taking the company public were reckless, since he didn’t “have an adequate basis in fact for his assertions.”

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