A group of former Twitter investors has won a federal civil lawsuit over Elon Musk’s actions amid a $44 billion acquisition of the social platform in 2022. A jury in San Francisco found on Friday that Musk’s tweets about fake accounts on the platform defrauded investors in the company. The jury sided with Musk on other charges in the case.
It’s not yet clear how much Musk will suffer as a result of the case associated Press According to reports, its amount could be billions of dollars. Jurors calculated that shareholders should receive “approximately $3 to $8 per stock per day.”
The class action lawsuit was one of several brought against Musk in the months following the company’s acquisition, citing Musk’s tweets about fake accounts on the platform. The lawsuit says that days after announcing the purchase of Twitter for $54.20 per share, Musk, facing a decline in Tesla’s stock price, made tweets and statements that intentionally sought to drive down Twitter’s stock price in an effort to renegotiate or exit the deal.
The lawsuit cites Musk’s May 13, 2022 tweet, which claimed the Twitter deal was “temporarily put on hold” due to the number of fake accounts and bots on the platform, as well as a comment a few days later suggesting that fake accounts could account for more than 20 percent of users. After the tweet of May 13, Twitter’s shares fell significantly.
During the trial, Musk said the tweets were “speaking his mind” and that Twitter executives had “lied” about the number of bots on the platform. KQED. Former Twitter shareholders, on the other hand, said they “sold shares at inflated prices amid Musk’s public opposition.”
Musk faced several lawsuits during and after the company’s $44 billion acquisition. This includes other shareholder lawsuits related to delays in disclosing his stake in the company, as well as a lawsuit from former executives related to unpaid severance benefits (Musk later settled those claims). He also narrowly escaped trial over his attempts to back out of the deal.
<a href