Elon Musk must not be too happy with how a securities fraud class-action lawsuit against him is playing out in court.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, his lawyers filed a motion asking the judge to declare a mistrial, alleging that misconduct by opposing lawyers and even the court itself has made a fair trial impossible for Musk. The request doesn\u2019t ask for the case to be dismissed outright, but instead for the trial to restart with a brand new jury.<\/p>\n
The case stems from a lawsuit accusing Musk of allegedly violating securities law by making misleading public statements in an effort to push Twitter\u2019s stock price down before he ultimately bought the platform in October 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam\/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,\u201d wrote Musk in a post<\/a> on May 13, 2022.<\/p>\n The lawsuit was filed on behalf of shareholders who sold Twitter stock between when that Tweet was posted and early October 2022.<\/p>\n Now, Musk\u2019s lawyers are trying to paint a picture that the trial has gone off the rails. In the motion, they argued that while each issue may \u201cnot independently warrant a mistrial,\u201d the \u201ccumulative prejudice requires one.\u201d<\/p>\n First, they accuse the plaintiffs\u2019 lawyers of repeatedly violating a pretrial ruling that barred them from suggesting to the jury that Musk violated securities laws by waiting too long to disclose to regulators that he had acquired his initial 5% stake in Twitter in early 2022. That issue is being litigated in a separate case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A judge refused to dismiss<\/a> that case last month.<\/p>\n Another reason Musk\u2019s lawyers say he deserves another shot is that Judge Charles Breyer allegedly exceeded his \u201csupervisory role\u201d during the examination of Twitter\u2019s former CFO Ned Segal and its former CEO Parag Agrawal.<\/p>\n