A San Francisco federal court on Friday acquitted Tesla CEO Elon Musk of a securities fraud class action lawsuit filed by a group of Tesla investors.
After a three-week trial, billionaire tycoon Elon Musk has been acquitted of allegedly committing felony stock fraud related to his messages posted on Twitter in 2018, in which he claimed to have the funds necessary to take the company public, something that has never happened.
«I’m considering taking Tesla off the stock market at $420 (€380). Funding secured,» Musk posted on Twitter, two years before becoming CEO of the social network.
«Investor support is confirmed. The only reason it’s not certain is that it depends on shareholder vote,» he added later.
As picked up by Bloomberg, Tesla shareholders filed a lawsuit against Musk, Tesla and the company’s board of directors over the messages arguing that such funding was not secured and further alluding to trading losses incurred due to fluctuations in Tesla’s stock following the tweets.
Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has claimed that Musk’s Twitter messages were «technically inaccurate.» «Just because it’s a bad tweet doesn’t make it a fraud,» he added, as reported by ABC News.
The entrepreneur claimed during the trial that he was aiming to raise funding for an alleged Tesla IPO thanks to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and that his Twitter messages were therefore intended to inform investors of his intentions.
For his part, the investors’ lawyer Nicholas Porrit argued that Musk could not have had a firm agreement, as he would only have had a 45-minute meeting with the leader of the Saudi fund, Yasir al Rumayyan, at a Tesla factory on July 31, 2018 and there was no written documentation, as ABC News has claimed.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
