Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s impulsive and sometimes inflammatory use of Twitter garnered attention Wednesday in a trial to determine whether the mogul misled investors with his 2018 tweets saying he had gotten the financing to buy out the shares of the electric vehicle maker, a proposal that quickly fell apart.
Musk’s Twitter habits shone in court a day after the 51-year-old billionaire completed three days of testimony in which he told a nine-member jury why he believed he could carry out a Tesla buyout that would have cost between 30,000 million and more than 70,000 million dollars at that time.
Musk, the current owner of the Twitter platform that is central to the lawsuit over his management of Tesla, raised the possibility of a full acquisition in a tweet on August 7, 2018, in which he stated that he had “funding secured” for the operation. . Musk posted another tweet a few hours later in which he hinted that a deal was imminent.
After it became clear he didn’t have the money to buy Tesla out and make it fully his own, Musk and the company reached a $40 million settlement with securities regulators, which said the billionaire’s tweets they were improper.
The furor behind Musk’s August 2018 tweets came just weeks after Tesla investors asked him to stop using Twitter for fear his comments would hurt the Tesla brand as well as the price of Tesla. company shares.
“If something bothers you, take a walk around the factory,” Ron Baron, a major Tesla shareholder, told Musk in an email dated July 15, 2018, presented as evidence during trial Wednesday. “Buy yourself an ice cream, just don’t use Twitter.”
Baron, whom Musk described as a well-versed investor during his deposition, wrote the email after Musk referred to a British cave explorer as a “pedophile” in a since-deleted tweet. Due to the word pedophile, the scout, Vernon Unsworth, sued for defamation and the jury returned a verdict resulting in a victory for Musk.
The tweet with the word “pedophile” also concerned another longtime ally, Antonio Gracias, who served on Tesla’s board of directors from 2007 to 2021. In his testimony Wednesday, Gracias acknowledged having had some discussions that “maybe Elon I had to stop tweeting.”
Tesla’s board of directors never took any formal steps to intervene in Musk’s use of Twitter, but Gracias said in his testimony that he personally asked the businessman to stop tweeting about a possible Tesla takeover without board approval. after the tweets on August 7, 2018.
