In San Francisco, the fraud trial against Elon Musk started on Tuesday with the jury composition. That jury will have to judge whether the big boss of Tesla and Twitter wrote a fraudulent tweet in 2018.
The case dates from augustus 2018, when Musk wrote on Twitter that he wanted to take Tesla private and had the necessary funding to do so. Tesla’s stock fluctuated enormously for several days because of the message.
“The plaintiffs allege that these tweets were factually inaccurate and artificially influenced Tesla’s stock price and other securities,” Judge Edward Chen summarized the case for potential jurors.
‘Not a fair trial’
On Friday, the judge had refused to move the proceedings to Texas, the US state to which Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters. According to the defense, the multibillionaire could not receive a fair trial in San Francisco because he recently bought Twitter in that state and has since come under heavy fire for certain decisions he made, including the monitoring of content on the platform and after massive redundancies within the company.
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“In recent months, local media have biased and published negative articles about Mr. Musk,” it said. The local press personally accuses Musk of cutting a significant number of jobs and even believes he is breaking the law. Local officials, even the mayor of San Francisco, have taken part in demonstrations against him.’ Judge Chen ruled on Friday that an independent jury could be assembled in the California city.
‘False and misleading’
The process will take three weeks. Elon Musk himself is on the witness list. Prior to this process, the judge had already ruled that the tweet in question could be regarded as ‘false and misleading’.
Short messages from the Tesla boss have often led to problems with authorities. Stock market watchdog SEC had already filed a complaint to Musk for the same tweet, as they said he couldn’t prove that funding that was being talked about. The regulator then forced him to relinquish the chairmanship of Tesla’s board of directors, pay a $20 million fine, and later required his tweets directly related to Tesla’s business to be pre-approved by an authorized body. lawyer. Elon Musk tried again in the spring to have this verdict invalidated, but failed.
