A jury on Friday found that Elon Musk misled Twitter’s shareholders by driving down Twitter’s stock price ahead of his $44 billion acquisition of the company in 2022.
The San Francisco jury were asked if two tweets and comments made by Musk on a podcast showed that he deliberately defrauded the shareholders and drove down Twitter’s stock price. They concluded that the tweets were false and misleading but did not hold him liable for the podcast comment.
The jury also dismissed the investors’ claim that Musk’s tweets and comments amounted to a scheme.
Four of the shareholders sued Musk in October 2022, claiming they suffered major losses as a result of Musk’s comments regarding spam bot accounts on Twitter, now the social platform X. The four shareholders’ lawyers said on Friday that Musk could now be forced to pay former shareholders around $2.5 billion, The New York Times reported.
“This is a great example of what you cannot do to the average investor –– people that have 401ks, kids, pension funds, teachers, firemen, nurses,” Joseph Cotchett, one of the investors’ attorneys, told CNBC. That’s what this case was all about. This was not about Musk. It was about the whole operation.”