“This may provide you with an opportunity to reconsider the price,” the banker wrote. “This may not be an expensive ask, as you will be considered willing to take the risk of paying the reverse brake fee. However, the threat of walking away may be enough to get them to agree to a lower price.”
A subsequent email from Barclays following the tweet said investors were now giving “50/50 odds” to the deal and that the share price would not rise much because they feared “more tweets with deal implications”.
Musk replied: “That matches my understanding of things.”
Shareholders are expected to seek billions in damages if a jury rules in their favor.
An attorney for the four plaintiffs said, “Musk believes he can say or do whatever he wants at any time, regardless of the consequences.” After taking a cold stance on the deal and struggling to sell enough Tesla stock to finance it, he launched “a public spectacle designed to ruin the company and drive down the stock price.”
Musk became frustrated during questioning, accusing lawyers of framing questions “designed to mislead the jury” and trying to “put words in my mouth.”
He said he did not have time to read the transcript of his testimony or prepare for the hearing because he had an “extreme workload, 100 hours a week.”
During the two-week hearing, the plaintiffs plan to call several of Musk’s top lieutenants, including his lawyer Alex Spiro, who recused himself from acting as an attorney in the case because he is also a witness.
On Tuesday, they questioned the head of his family office, Jared Birchall, who said Musk’s tweets about the deal were made out of frustration and that work on the deal never stopped.
Musk is scheduled to appear in a separate trial in Oakland next month. They have sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in an effort to stop the $730 billion start-up from converting from a non-profit to a for-profit company. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left three years later after his attempts to buy it were rejected.
© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.
<a href