Jury: Musk Misled Twitter Shareholders to Get Lower Price

A federal jury in San Francisco has found Elon Musk liable for misleading Twitter shareholders back in 2022. The verdict is that he intentionally drove down the company's stock price so he could renegotiate or back out of the $44 billion deal. Not just messy tweets. Fraud.

The case centered on Musk's May 2022 tweets, including the one where he said the deal was 'temporarily on hold' pending proof about bot accounts. Shareholders argued he knew what he was doing. The jury agreed on two of the four claims, finding that those statements were false and artificially tanked Twitter's share price. The plaintiffs' lawyer put the damages around $2.6 billion, though the final number will come later when individual investors submit claims.

Musk's lawyers are appealing, calling the verdict 'a bump in the road.' He's had a pretty good run in court lately, winning similar Tesla shareholder cases, but this one stuck. The jury deliberated for about three days after a three-week trial that put Musk on the stand defending his bot obsession.