Elon Musk could soon own Twitter, but his own use of the platform will remain constrained by a 2018 agreement he signed with the US sharemarket regulator.

A federal judge in New York denied a request by Musk to end the agreement, which requires him to run his social media posts by a company lawyer if the statements contained material information about his electric car company, Tesla.

Musk had argued that the agreement to settle accusations of securities violations infringed on his right to freedom of speech and that the Securities and Exchange Commission had used the agreement as an excuse to “launch endless, boundless” investigations of his public statements. He claimed he accepted the settlement in the first place only because the litigation would have put too much financial pressure on Tesla.

“None of the arguments hold water,” Judge Lewis J. Liman of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote in a ruling issued on Wednesday that dismissed Musk’s claims.

Musk’s assertion that he agreed to the SEC’s conditions because of the financial burden was “wholly unpersuasive,” Liman wrote. Musk, the judge said, “was already a multibillionaire in 2018 and one of the wealthiest individuals in the world.”

Alex Spiro, a lawyer at the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who represents Musk, suggested that an appeal was likely.

‘None of the arguments hold water.’

Judge Lewis J. Liman

“Nothing will ever change the truth, which is that Elon Musk was considering taking Tesla private and could have — all that’s left some half-decade later is remnant litigation which will continue to make that truth clearer and clearer,” Spiro said in a statement, adding, “Stay tuned.” He declined to comment further.

The decision came two days after Twitter’s board agreed to sell the company to Musk for $US44 billion ($62 billion)— a transaction that still has to win the approval of shareholders. He had previously accused the social network of censoring free speech and has said he thinks people should be allowed to speak more freely on Twitter, which in recent years has sought to restrict misinformation, hate speech and other problematic statements on its platform.