Remember when New York's governor, Kathy Hochul oozily assured businessmen, some of whom were thinking of fleeing the state, that there was "nothing to worry about" regarding the state's lawfare targeting President Trump that could possibly affect other businessmen?

In February, The Guardian reported this:

The New York governor has told business owners in her state that there is “nothing to worry about” after Donald Trump was fined $355m and temporarily banned from engaging in commerce in the state when he lost his civil fraud trial on Friday.

In an interview on the New York radio show the Cats Roundtable with the supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis, Kathy Hochul sought to quell fears in some quarters that the penalties handed to Trump for engaging in fraudulent business practices could chill the state’s commercial climate.

Asked if businesspeople should be worried that if prosecutors could “do that to the former president, they can do that to anybody”, Hochul said: “Law-abiding and rule-following New Yorkers who are businesspeople have nothing to worry about because they’re very different than Donald Trump and his behavior.”

The SEC has spent the past couple of years investigating Musk's purchase of Twitter — and the way he disclosed, and didn't disclose, the fact that he was buying up Twitter shares before buying it in 2022.

Now The Wall Street Journal suggests that the agency is getting closer to making a formal case, and floats the notion that it could cost Musk his role as the CEO of Tesla, as well as the chief technical officer at Twitter/X:

The SEC hasn't filed any enforcement action so far against Musk over his Twitter trading. If the SEC makes a formal complaint against Musk for fraud, regulators are likely to again ask a court to bar him from serving as an officer or director of a public company, former officials said, exposing him to the possibility of removal from Tesla.

Just as they tried to take away Trump's right to do business in the state of New York, Biden's SEC is trying to take away Musk's right to lead his own companies if they are publicly traded. It doesn't matter what the shareholders want. They want to deprive Tesla and other companies Musk serves as a top company officer for from his business, same as they tried for Trump.

As for disclosures, who on Earth tells the world when he is buying a big stake in a company bit by bit? We know that hedge funds, mutual funds, and other big whales of finance don't. As long as the buying is transparent, and people can see it if they look, it seems the charges are questionable. While I am no legal expert on this matter, it seems a bit odd to see them going after him for this unless the market itself recognizes what he did as a crime. So far, I have not seen any significant speaking out from those quarters, just criticism from political types who hated the guy to begin with.

Musk himself has called it lawfare, and who is to argue with him?