Elon Musk tries again to escape FTC audits of X data handling
Elon Musk tries again to escape FTC audits of X data handling
Publish Date: 2026-06-04 15:49:00
Source Domain: arstechnica.com
Musk lost his previous lawsuit after the court found it had no authority to amend or end the FTC’s order. Musk is trying again with new arguments, complaining in a May petition to the FTC that they should set aside the order “without delay.”
According to Musk, the FTC should stop its monitoring because Twitter no longer exists, as X was merged into xAI, and then xAI was folded into SpaceX. Musk also argues that since none of the leadership or engineers responsible for the two-factor authentication error remain at the company, and “X has since built a world-class privacy and data-protection program” that protects consumers, the FTC doesn’t have to intervene anymore.
The company further argued that it has paid $17 million in “needless costs,” since a lawsuit over the same two-factor authentication issue ended with a verdict in Twitter’s favor. If a court found that Twitter’s privacy policy adequately informed users that their contact info might be used for ad targeting, then the FTC should not be able to continue punishing X for that behavior, Musk argued.
“The factual foundation of the FTC’s complaint has been dismantled,” X says. “And the Order’s staggering costs—imposed on both the Company and on the Commission itself are unjustifiable.”
As X sees it, the order also requires the company to duplicate compliance efforts, because X already must take extra precautions with data to comply with laws such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Finally, X raised two other claims to justify tossing the order. First, X claimed that allowing the FTC to maintain the order would chill speech on X, because it supposedly “creates a permanent mechanism through which future regulators can pressure the Company over the viewpoints it hosts.”
And second, X argued that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan requires government agencies to drop orders such as this one. Since X is “at the center of…
