In San Francisco, the fraud trial against Elon Musk began Tuesday with jury formation. The jury will have to rule on whether the big boss of Tesla and Twitter wrote a fraudulent tweet in 2018.
Case date from August 2018, when Musk wrote on Twitter that he wanted to make Tesla private and that he had the funding to do so. Tesla stock fluctuated wildly for several days due to the message.
Judge Edward Chen summed up the case file for prospective jurors: “Prosecutors allege that these tweets were factually inaccurate and artificially affected Tesla’s stock price and other securities.”
Not a fair trial
On Friday, the judge refused to transfer the proceedings to the US state of Texas, to which Musk had moved Tesla headquarters. According to the defense, the billionaire was unable to get a fair trial in San Francisco because he recently bought Twitter in that state and has since come under fire for some of the decisions he made, including censoring content on the platform and after massive redundancies at home. company.
• Trump and Musk stand against California
“In recent months, the local media has taken sides and published negative articles about Mr. Musk,” she said. The local press is personally accusing Musk of cutting a large number of jobs and even believes he is breaking the law. Local officials, even the mayor of San Francisco, have held demonstrations against it. Judge Chen ruled on Friday that an independent jury could be set up in the California city.
* False and misleading
The process will take three weeks. Elon Musk himself is on the witness list. Prior to this process, the judge had already ruled that the tweet in question could be considered “false and misleading”.
SMS from the head of Tesla often led to problems with the authorities. The Saudi Securities and Exchange Authority had already filed a complaint to Musk for the same tweet, where they said he couldn’t prove the funding that was talked about. The regulator then forced him to concede chairmanship of Tesla’s board of directors, pay a $20 million fine, and later required that his tweets directly related to Tesla’s business be pre-approved by an authorized body attorney. Elon Musk tried again in the spring to overturn this ruling, but failed.
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