A federal jury in California found on Friday that tech mogul Elon Musk misled Twitter shareholders in an effort to drive down the company’s stock price as he prepared to buy it in a $44 billion deal.
The decision in the high-profile bail case means the world’s richest man could be ordered to pay as much as US$2.6 billion, based on damages calculated by jurors.
Giuseppe Pampena filed a lawsuit against Musk on behalf of people who sold Twitter shares between mid-May 2022 and early October of that year.
Jurors agreed with the plaintiff that Musk violated securities laws that prohibit false and misleading statements that lower the stock price, in this case Twitter, the decision form showed.
The civil complaint accused Musk of lowering Twitter’s stock price in order to gain leverage to renegotiate the purchase price or pull out of the deal altogether, causing people who sold the stock to lose money.
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Musk announces plans to turn Twitter into a super ‘X’ app similar to China’s WeChat
Musk announces plans to turn Twitter into a super ‘X’ app similar to China’s WeChat
Musk tweeted at one point during the process that the buyout plan was temporarily suspended until Twitter administrators could confirm the percentage of “bots” — fake accounts run by software rather than real users — was as low as the social media platform claimed.
