A jury in California found that Elon Musk misled Twitter shareholders during the runup to his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company, according to a verdict issued on Friday.
Total damages could reach up to $2.6 billion, the attorneys for the plaintiffs said.
The class action lawsuit, Pampena v. Musk, was originally filed in October 2022, after Musk completed his purchase of Twitter for $54.20 per share. He later renamed the company X, before merging it with his artificial intelligence company xAI, and then with SpaceX, his reusable rocket manufacturer.
“This is a great example of what you cannot do to the average investor -- people that have 401ks, kids, pension funds, teachers, firemen, nurses,” attorneys for the Twitter investors told CNBC at the San Francisco courthouse. “That’s what this case was all about. This was not about Musk. It was about the whole operation.”
After Musk bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, his sentiment towards the deal quickly soured as he cast doubt on the company’s claimed level of bots, spam and fake accounts on its platform. Musk wrote in a tweet the following month that his acquisition was “temporarily on hold” until Twitter’s CEO could prove its inauthentic account levels were around the 5% reported in the company’s SEC filings.
