Elon Musk misled investors on Twitter while trying to get out, a judge says

A judge in California on Friday he ruled that Elon Musk deliberately misled investors on Twitter when he he tried to go back for its acquisition of $ 44 billion on the platform in 2022.

At the time, Musk wrote that Twitter had a lot of bots, which is why he later tried to restore his findings. (Twitter ended to challenge Musk to force him to seal the deal.)

“Twitter’s contract has been temporarily suspended pending confirmation that spam/fake accounts represent less than 5% of users,” Musk wrote on the platform that he called X.

Within days of Musk posting this, Twitter shared it down 8%. Investor Giuseppe Pampena filed a lawsuit against Musk on behalf of other former Twitter owners who sold Twitter shares between May 13 (the day of the tweet) and October 4, the day the deal was completed.

Sometimes a case He said that Musk deliberately wrote about his concerns with Twitter to raise doubts about the platform’s sustainability in order to reduce its value, causing losses for those who sell shares on the platform. Musk’s attorneys said they were expressing concerns about the number of bots on the app. But the judges were very satisfied with what the defendant said.

It’s not yet known how much Musk will pay to former Twitter owners, but Pampena’s lawyer said the damages could reach $2.6 billion, according to Price CNBC. It’s not a big problem for Musk, as such Bloomberg he estimates his net worth at $660 billion.

This is not the first time Musk has gone to court over tweets. In 2018, he wrote that he has them security deposit taking Tesla private at $420 per share, meaning they planned to buy out their shareholders and take the company off the stock market. The The SEC says that these documents were misleading, and charged Musk with securities fraud. Later Musk had to testify in court that he was not joking about marijuana (420 being a popular word for marijuana) and he said that he believed with all his heart that he would take Tesla private for $ 420 per share, which was very profitable for the price of Tesla at that time.

Musk won the same lawsuit that his shareholders filed over the “safe money” tweet, but this time he has to pay.

After acquiring Twitter, Musk rebranded the company as X, then merged it with his new AI company, xAI. The merged company was appreciated $113 billionaccording to Musk. So, last month, SpaceX was merged with xAI. Musk has said the merger was motivated by his desire to build a data center in space.