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... Musk broke the news himself in a social-media post: "Oh Gary, how could you do this to me?" he wrote, referring to SEC Chair Gary Gensler.

He added a smiley-face emoji but attached a legal letter condemning the "improperly motivated" ultimatum: "We demand to know who directed these actions"whether it was you or the White House." ...

The SEC is not the only investigative agency Musk has defied and accused of political harassment. The billionaire has long railed against government oversight, portraying himself as a victim of bureaucratic zealots stifling his companies' potentially life-saving innovations. ...

Musk's potential to have extraordinary clout with the new administration raises questions about the fate of federal investigations and regulatory actions affecting his business empire, of which at least 20 are ongoing, according to three sources familiar with SpaceX and Tesla operations and the companies' interaction with the U.S. government, as well as five current and former officials who have direct knowledge of individual probes into Musk's companies.

The inquiries include examinations of the alleged securities violations; questions over the safety of Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems; potential animal-welfare violations in Neuralink's brain-chip experiments; and alleged pollution, hiring-discrimination and licensing problems at SpaceX. ...