A trial against Elon Musk opened this Tuesday in San Francisco with the selection of jurors, who must decide if the head of Tesla and Twitter wrote a fraudulent tweet in 2018, as accused by investors.
The case dates back to August 2018, when Elon Musk tweeted that he wanted to take Tesla off the stock market, after he had the necessary funding to do so. The messages from him had caused the stock to swing sharply for a few days.
“The plaintiffs allege that these tweets were in fact false and artificially affected the price of Tesla’s shares and other securities,” judge Edward Chen summed up for potential jurors. On Friday, the magistrate refused to transfer the proceedings to Texas, the US state to which Elon Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters.
The defense argued that the billionaire could not benefit from a fair trial in San Francisco, where he bought Twitter in late October, and has been widely criticized for his decisions, from the platform’s content moderation policy to mass layoffs.
A tweet considered “false and misleading”
“The local press, contrary to their usual way of covering (social plans), personally blamed Mr. Musk for the job cuts and even accused him of breaking the law. Local elected officials, including the mayor of San Francisco, participated in the protests. against him,” they continued.
Edward Chen, on the contrary, estimated on Friday that an impartial jury could be constituted in the Californian city. The trial is scheduled to last three weeks and Elon Musk is on the witness list. In an earlier decision related to this case, the judge ruled that the famous 2018 tweet could be considered “false and misleading.”
The brief messages from the Tesla boss have already earned him numerous disputes with the authorities. The American stock market police, the SEC, had also filed a complaint at the time, considering that Elon Musk had not provided evidence of his financing.
The regulator then forced him to hand over the chairmanship of Tesla’s board of directors, pay a $20 million fine, and then required that his tweets directly related to Tesla’s business be pre-approved by competent counsel. Elon Musk tried again in the spring to overturn this decision, to no avail.
Source: BFM TV
