{"id":357070,"date":"2026-03-21T01:59:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T01:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/357070\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T01:59:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T01:59:06","slug":"elon-musk-misled-investors-during-twitter-purchase-us-jury-finds-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/357070\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk misled investors during Twitter purchase, US jury finds \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">A jury has found <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/elon-musk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/elon-musk\/\">Elon Musk<\/a> liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/twitter\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/twitter\/\">Twitter<\/a>\u2019s stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion (\u20ac38 billion).<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">But it absolved him of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not \u201cscheme\u201d to mislead investors.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The civil trial in San Francisco centred on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Jurors were asked to decide if two tweets and comments Musk made on a podcast in May 2022 amounted to him intentionally defrauding Twitter shareholders, who sold their shares based on Musk\u2019s statements.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The nine-person jury returned the verdict after three days of deliberation, nearly three weeks after the trial began on March 2nd.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">They said that while Musk was liable for misleading investors with two tweets \u2013 including one that said the Twitter deal was \u201ctemporarily on hold\u201d \u2013 he did not do so with a statement he made on a podcast and that he did not intentionally \u201cscheme\u201d to defraud investors.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Because it is a class action case, it is not clear what amount in damages Musk will have to pay to thousands of shareholders, many of them institutional investors, but it is likely in the billions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The jury awarded shareholders between about $3-$8 per stock per day.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Musk\u2019s fortune is currently estimated at about $814 billion, much of it tied up in Tesla shares.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Much of the trial focused on Musk\u2019s claims about the number of bots on Twitter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \"> He testified that Twitter had a much higher number of fake and spam accounts than the 5 per cent it disclosed in regulatory filings. He used what he called Twitter\u2019s misrepresentation of the number of fake accounts on its service as a reason to retreat from the purchase.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">After Musk tried to back out, Twitter went to court in Delaware to force him to honour his original deal. Just before that case was scheduled to go to trial, he reversed course again and agreed to pay what he had originally promised. \u2013 Associated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter\u2019s stock price in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,605,61,60,1188,6606,115],"class_list":["post-357070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-elon-musk","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-tesla","tag-twitter","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}