A California civil jury found Elon Musk intentionally misled Twitter investors when he posted about bot concerns on the platform in May 2022, a move jurors concluded was designed to drive down the stock price as he sought to escape a $44 billion acquisition agreement.
The lawsuit was filed by investor Giuseppe Pampena on behalf of former Twitter shareholders who sold shares between May 13, 2022 — the day Musk tweeted that the deal was “temporarily on hold” pending verification that spam and fake accounts represented less than 5% of users — and October 4, 2022, when the acquisition closed. In the days following that tweet, Twitter’s share price dropped 8%. Pampena’s legal team argued Musk deliberately manufactured uncertainty around the platform’s value to suppress its stock, causing sellers in that window to absorb losses they otherwise would not have faced.
Musk’s attorneys maintained he was raising legitimate concerns about bots.
The jury sided with the plaintiffs. Damages have not yet been determined, though Pampena‘s attorney told CNBC they could reach as high as $2.6 billion. According to Bloomberg, Musk’s net worth currently exceeds $660 billion, making that figure a fraction of his estimated wealth.
A Pattern in Court
This is not Musk’s first legal reckoning over social media posts that moved markets. In 2018, he tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share, intending to buy out public shareholders and delist the company. The SEC charged him with securities fraud over those posts. Musk later testified in court that he was not making a cannabis reference — 420 being widely understood as such — and that he genuinely believed the privatization would happen at that price, which represented a substantial premium on Tesla’s stock at the time. He prevailed in that shareholder lawsuit. He will not escape liability in this one.
What Musk Has Built Since
After completing the Twitter acquisition, Musk renamed the platform X and later merged it with his AI company, xAI, placing the combined entity’s valuation at $113 billion, according to his own statements. Last month, SpaceX merged with xAI as well, a consolidation Musk says was driven by his ambition to build data centers in space.
Twitter, which Musk once tried to abandon, now sits at the center of an expanding corporate structure he controls entirely — the result of a deal a jury just ruled he tried to manipulate his way out of.
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