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Tuesday in San Francisco, the trial of American billionaire Elon Musk began against the backdrop of tweets he published in August 2018 in which he talked about obtaining financing to convert the Tesla electric car company into a private company, which caused its share price to fluctuate sharply for a few days and prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States. accused of fraud and misleading investors. The trial comes after a judge on Friday refused to move its proceedings to Texas, where Tesla is headquartered, while his lawyers said he could not enjoy an impartial trial in San Francisco.
Trial started Elon Musk Tuesday in San Francisco to choose the members of the jury who will have to decide whether the head of Tesla and Twitter wrote a fraudulent tweet in 2018 as investors accuse him.
The case goes back to August 2018, when Musk tweeted that he wanted to take Tesla off the stock exchange because he had enough funding to do so. This caused the company’s share price to swing sharply for a few days.
Musk said in his tweets at the time that he was considering making Tesla a private company at a price of $ 420 per share. “Financing is guaranteed,” he stressed.
In another tweet during the same day, Musk wrote: “Investor support confirmed,” adding: “The only reason for the uncertainty of this happening is that it is contingent on the shareholder vote.”
Saudi Arabia is a source of support
And judicial documents showed that Musk had met with the governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, Yasser Al-Rumayyan, on several occasions, and that the latter urged Musk to turn Tesla into a private company.
According to the documents, Al-Rumayyan offered Musk support of up to $60 billion for this endeavour.
“Prosecutors allege that these tweets were factually wrong and affected the price of Tesla and other stocks,” Judge Edward Chen told prospective jurors.
On Friday, the judge refused to transfer the trial procedures to the US state of Texas, where Elon Musk moved the headquarters of Tesla.
Musk’s lawyers said the billionaire could not enjoy an impartial trial in San Francisco, where he bought it Twitter In late October, he came under fire for his decisions, from platform content management policy to mass layoffs.
“In recent months, the local media has flooded this region with biased and negative stories about Musk,” the lawyers said in their request.
They added: “The local press, contrary to its usual way of covering (social plans), blamed Musk personally for the job cuts, and accused him of breaking the law. Local elected officials, including the mayor of San Francisco, also participated in the protests against him.”
In turn, Judge Edward Chen considered Friday that an impartial jury could be formed in the city of California. The trial is scheduled to last 3 weeks.
Securities Commission complaint
In a previous decision related to this case, a judge ruled that the famous tweet published in 2018 could be considered “false and misleading”.
And the tweets of the head of Tesla have previously caused disagreements between him and the authorities.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint following that tweet, believing that Elon Musk did not provide evidence that he had the necessary financing.
At that time, the body that supervised the stock exchange forced him to relinquish the chairmanship of Tesla’s board of directors, pay a fine of $ 20 million, and later demanded that his tweets related to Tesla’s activity be pre-approved by a specialized lawyer.
Last spring, Musk unsuccessfully tried to reverse that decision.
FRANCE 24/AFP/Reuters
