How much will the billionaire’s deception of shareholders cost?
Jurors of the federal court in San Francisco determined that Elon Musk intentionally misled Twitter shareholders in an attempt to lower the purchase price of the platform in 2022.
This was reported by RBC-Ukraine, citing Bloomberg.
Also read: The last straw: how a drone over Kyiv pushed Musk to block Starlink in Russia
What the jurors decided
The eight-member jury concluded that Musk’s tweets, particularly a post from May 13, 2022, about a “temporary pause” in the deal due to allegedly too many fake accounts, were part of a deliberate plan. The goal was to lower Twitter’s stock price to renegotiate the purchase terms.
The jurors dismissed two of the four fraud allegations. They upheld the other two.
How much will he have to pay
The exact amount of damages will be determined later when shareholders file individual lawsuits. Investor attorney Mark Molamfi believes the total compensation could amount to $2.6 billion.
However, even such an amount is unlikely to significantly impact Musk’s wealth: on Friday, March 20, his net worth was $661.1 billion.
How Musk bought Twitter
Musk initially proposed the $44 billion deal himself. He then began to publicly doubt it: he wrote about bots, fake accounts, and questioned the company’s data.
Twitter’s stock fell to $32.52 during these months – 40% below the buyout price. When Twitter filed a lawsuit, Musk eventually agreed to the original price of $54.20 per share.
In court, he explained this by saying he believed the judge in Delaware was biased against him.
He claimed that former Twitter executives lied to him and in public reports about the number of bots on the platform.
“Maybe it’s not my wisest tweet. I don’t know if I would call it the dumbest. But if it led to this lawsuit, then it probably can be classified that way,” Musk commented on his controversial tweet about the “pause” in the deal.
At the same time, he stated that he never claimed to have paused the deal.
“This case is much larger than Twitter; it directly concerns Wall Street and what has been happening in recent years. It’s a great example of what shouldn’t be done to an ordinary investor,” said investor attorney Joseph Cotchett.
Musk’s team plans to appeal.
Recall that after purchasing Twitter in 2022, Musk stated that the platform’s commitment to content moderation “remains absolutely unchanged.”
At the same time, he announced mass layoffs due to losses of more than $4 million a day. All laid-off employees were offered three months of severance pay.
Musk plans to launch Grokipedia – a competitor to Wikipedia based on artificial intelligence. The Grok chatbot from his startup xAI will analyze Wikipedia pages, identify errors and inaccuracies, and rewrite them.
Musk has long criticized Wikipedia for its liberal bias. He previously even suggested cutting off funding for the encyclopedia.
