The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has reopened an investigation into Elon Musk's brain-computer implant company Neuralink, according to a letter Musk posted on X penned by his attorney and directed at SEC chair Gary Gensler. 

Musk also mocked the SEC in a post saying it was "just another weaponized institution doing political dirty work."

The letter, published on Dec. 12, also says the SEC gave Musk a 48-hour settlement deadline to either "accept monetary payment or face charges on numerous counts" pertaining to his $44 billion Twitter takeover. 

It claims the demand follows a multi-year investigation and six years of harassment of Musk by the SEC and its staff. 

Exact details of the SEC's investigation have not been disclosed, but Neuralink has been under pressure by lawmakers for alleged animal deaths during testing, with numerous letters penned over the last couple of years, including a letter in May of 2023 by eight members of Congress to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

The May letter cited a previous letter by the group citing alleged "credible reports of possible Animal Welfare Act violations perpetrated by Neuralink, a private company that uses monkeys, pigs, sheep, and rats in experiments related to the development of a brain-machine interface" and the importance of the departments to look into the allegations. 

The lawmakers raised additional concerns due to a potential conflict of interest between the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). The letter said the IACUC "appears to be composed almost exclusively of company employees with significant financial stakes in the very animal studies they are required to evaluate under the Animal Welfare Act."

Additionally, the letter alleged that several IACUC members "report to the committee's chairperson in their regular Neuralink roles, separate from the IACUC" and those conflicts were not disclosed to the USDA. The lawmakers cited a Reuters article outlining the allegations.  

Later in September 2023, four U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to the SEC requesting an investigation into whether Musk committed securities fraud by allegedly misleading investors about the safety of Neuralink's brain implant. 

The inquiry request came from Democratic House representatives Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and California reps. Barbara Lee and Tony Cardenas.  

In a now-deleted post from September 2023, Musk wrote, "No monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant. First our early implants, to minimize risk to healthy monkeys, we chose terminal moneys [sic] (close to death already)."

Researchers have expressed concerns about the lack of transparency around Neuralink's implant, and activist group The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates against animal testing, filed a complaint in 2022 with the U.S. Department of Agriculture against the University of California, Davis, alleging that Neuralink violated the federal Animal Welfare Act due to invasive testing and performing brain experiments on monkeys.  

Still, although the FDA initially rejected Neuralink's request to begin human trials of the brain implant in March 2023, the company ultimately received the go-ahead and earlier this year completed its first successful device implantation in a patient, who has since used the company's BCI in various applications, such as playing video games and online chess. 

Neuralink is currently looking for individuals to participate in its PRIME study in the U.S., a clinical trial for its brain-computer interface designed to provide individuals with quadriplegia with the ability to use digital devices by thinking, and received approval from Health Canada to perform a clinical trial on its N1 brain implant and R1 robot, which is used to place the implant into the brain.

THE LARGER TREND

On Nov. 21, the SEC announced that Gensler would step down as chair of the commission, effective Jan. 20, 2025. 

The letter comes as the U.S. prepares for a political power transition to the Trump administration in January.

President-elect Donald Trump previously announced that Musk, alongside former 2024 challenger Vivek Ramaswamy, would be a member of a task force dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a presidential advisor commission that will oversee and potentially cut, according to Musk and Ramaswamy, regulations, spending and headcounts within the federal government.

"Most legal edicts aren't laws enacted by Congress but "rules and regulations" promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year," the billionaires wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal last month.  

"Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren't made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections." 

The pair said they would work in the new administration and closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget to advise on three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.