Elon Musk, the billionaire technology entrepreneur, will step down as chairman of the electric car company Tesla and pay a £15 million fine to settle fraud charges.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the American financial markets regulator, announced the deal with the electric carmaker’s chief executive on Saturday night.

The settlement comes just two days after the SEC sued Musk for fraud and sought to have him barred from running Tesla or any other publicly-traded company.

In August, Musk falsely claimed on Twitter that he had secured funds for a multi-billion dollar buyout of Tesla, leading its share price to soar and creating huge losses for “short-selling” investors who had bet against the company.

“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420 [per share]. Funding secured,” Musk wrote on Twitter, after a meeting with Saudi investors who had expressed an interest in the company. It soon emerged that such a deal was far from guaranteed, and the SEC launched an investigation into the tweet.