Musk a South African immigrant vindicated over 2018 Tesla tweets, didn’t defraud investors –Jury

Elon Musk’s 2018 tweets about electric carmaker Tesla in a planned merger that swiftly fell through aroused concerns about whether the billionaire had defrauded investors, but a jury on Friday found that the tycoon had not.

After a three-week trial, the nine-member jury returned a verdict after less than two hours of deliberation. It signals a significant victory for Musk, who spent approximately eight hours on the witness stand justifying the reasons behind the tweets from August 2018 that served as the trial’s focal point.

The 51-year-old Musk was not present for the quick reading of the judgment, but he unexpectedly showed up earlier on Friday for the closing arguments, which painted quite different pictures of him.

Shortly after the decision was made, Musk used his newly acquired bully pulpit, Twitter, to express his joy.

Thank heaven; the people’s wisdom has won out. Musk tweeted.

According to Michael Freedman, a former federal prosecutor who is now in private practice working for a law firm that has represented celebrities and business executives, Musk’s choice to take time away from his other obligations to attend the closing arguments even though he wasn’t required to do so may have had an effect on the jurors.

It demonstrates his existence, according to Freedman.

Attorney Nicholas Porritt, who defended resentful Tesla investors, expressed disappointment after pleading with the jury during his closing statements to hold Musk accountable for his careless actions that threatened to “spread anarchy.”

A dejected employee said, “I don’t think this is the kind of behavior we expect from a huge public corporation.” After discussing the verdict with a few jurors who had arrived to speak with him, Porritt said. People are free to reach their own conclusions about whether something is acceptable or not.

The jury told Porritt that they thought Musk’s statement that he thought he had secured the funds from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund without a written promise to be plausible during their conversation. Additionally, they questioned whether the fluctuations in Tesla’s stock price over a 10-day period in August 2018 encompassed by the case were the result of Musk’s tweets alone.

Musk, who is the CEO of both the electric car manufacturer and the Twitter service he recently acquired for $44 billion, was up against Tesla investors who were represented in a class-action lawsuit.

On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted that he had secured the funding to take Tesla private, even though it later emerged that he hadn’t secured a firm commitment for the transaction, which would have cost between $20 billion and $70 billion to complete. A few hours later, Musk tweeted once more to say the agreement would soon be finalized.

At the trial, Musk’s reputation was on the line, along with a fortune that has made him one of the richest individuals on earth. Had the jury decided that the tweets from 2018 were fakes, as the judge presiding over the trial had previously determined, he might have been hit with a bill for billions of dollars in damages.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s decision from last year left it up to the jury to determine whether Musk acted recklessly with his tweeting and in a way that affected Tesla shareholders.

Given that it essentially turned into an up-or-down vote, Freedman claimed that the jury’s task may not have been all that challenging.

Earlier on Friday, during the trial’s closing statements, Musk sat stoically in court as he was both denounced as a wealthy and irresponsible narcissist and praised as a visionary looking out for the “little guy.”

Porritt had pleaded with the jury during an hour-long presentation to condemn Musk for his “loose connection with the truth.”

Porritt stated that “our society is based on rules.” “Rules are necessary for us to avoid chaos. Elon Musk should be subject to the same rules as everyone else.

The lawyer for Elon Musk, Alex Spiro, acknowledged that the 2018 tweets were “technically wrong.” “Just because it’s a lousy tweet doesn’t make it a fraud,” he said to the jury.

Musk said he thought he had secured the money from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to take Tesla private after eight years as a publicly traded business during almost eight hours on the stand earlier in the trial. He justified his initial tweet from August 2018 by saying it was sent with the best of intentions to let all Tesla investors know that the automaker might be about to stop operating as a publicly traded corporation.

Musk admitted in court, “I had no ulterior motive.” “My goal was to act in the best interests of all shareholders,”

In his final defense, Spiro repeated that idea.

He was attempting to involve small investors, mom-and-pop businesses, and other retail shareholders in order to avoid consolidating his own authority, according to Spiro.

Porritt, on the other hand, laughed at the idea that Musk could have determined he had a clear commitment following a 45-minute discussion with Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund, at a Tesla factory on July 31, 2018, given the lack of written documentation.

In his 90-minute presentation, Spiro stressed Musk’s track record of founding and managing a number of businesses, including Tesla and SpaceX in addition to PayPal, a pioneer in digital payments. Despite a sharp decrease in its stock price last year amid worries that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter would cause him to become distracted from Tesla, the Austin, Texas-based automaker now has a market value of close to $600 billion.

Spiro recalled Musk’s South African immigrant background and how he arrived in Silicon Valley to build game-changing software firms. He called his client “the kind of person who believes the unbelievable is attainable.”