According to a report, Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to have violated federal law by failing to notify the SEC about his purchase of Twitter stock.

According to The Washington Post, SEC regulations required Musk to notify the market when his stake in the social media company surpassed the 5% threshold — a delay that reportedly netted him a profit of $156 million.

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Musk stunned the world on Monday when it was revealed that he had purchased a 9.5% stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder.

Musk’s stake in Twitter had reached 5% on March 14, but the markets were not informed of his purchases until Monday when disclosure forms were made public. By failing to notify investors, Musk was able to keep the stock price low while continuing to buy shares.

Twitter’s stock price increased by 30% after Musk filed his disclosure forms.

“I don’t know what’s going through his mind,” finance professor David Kass of the University of Maryland told The Washington Post. “Was he ignorant or knowledgeable that he was violating securities law?”

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Experts told the paper that Musk may have misled the public when he filed forms indicating he would be a “passive investor,” especially given Twitter’s announcement that he would be joining the board of directors.

The Washington Post has reached out to Musk and the SEC for comment. According to experts, Musk, 50, is unlikely to be arrested or imprisoned.

The SEC is expected to levy a six-figure fine on the world’s richest person, whose net worth is estimated to be around $280 billion — nearly $100 billion more than the second-richest person on the list, Jeff Bezos.

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Musk has previously clashed with the SEC, most notably over the mogul’s misleading tweet on Aug. 7, 2018, claiming he had secured funding to take Tesla, private, at $420 per share — a price he later admitted was a pot joke to impress his then-girlfriend Grimes.

Last month, the SEC filed documents in federal court in Manhattan reminding Musk that he was bound by an agreement to have any tweets about his Tesla ownership vetted before posting.

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The SEC also denied Musk’s “substantially meritless” motion to quash a subpoena for records relating to his Twitter poll last November on whether to sell some of his Tesla stock.

According to Tesla, the SEC requested “information on our governance processes around compliance” in November, following a September 2018 settlement between the company and the regulatory agency.

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The subpoena was issued just 10 days after Musk sparked a stock market sell-off by asking his Twitter followers if he should sell 10% of his stake in the company.

During the two days of trading that followed the tweet, Tesla’s stock price fell by 16%.