A US jury has found that Elon Musk misled investors by deliberately driving down Twitter’s share price in the months before his $44bn (£33bn) acquisition of the social media company.
But the tech giant and the world’s richest man was acquitted of some fraud charges in a civil trial in San Francisco.
The case was the focus of a class-action lawsuit that was filed shortly before mr musk took possession of TwitterWhich he later named X.
Jurors were asked to decide whether two tweets and comments made by Mr Musk on a podcast in May 2022 amounted to intentionally deceiving Twitter shareholders who sold their shares based on his statements.
It is unclear how much compensation Mr. Musk will have to pay to thousands of shareholders, many of whom are institutional investors, but it is likely to be in the billions.
His wealth is currently estimated at around $814 billion (£610 billion), much of it tied up in Tesla share.
Much of the case involved Mr Musk’s claim that the social media platform had underreported how many fake and spam accounts, known as bots, existed on its platform.
The court was shown a tweet from May 2022 in which the tycoon said his acquisition “cannot proceed” unless Twitter’s chief executive proved the bot percentage was below 5%.
“They ruined the company. Ruined the executives. And ruined the stock,” Mark Molumphy, a lawyer for the shareholders, said during his closing arguments Tuesday.
Mr Musk’s lawyer Michael Lifrak argued that the billionaire’s concerns about bots were genuine, and that speaking out about the problem does not indicate that he has committed fraud or intends to commit fraud.
Mr Musk used Twitter’s misrepresentations about the number of fake accounts on its service to back out of the purchase.
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After they tried to back out, Twitter took legal action to force them to honor their original deal.
Mr Musk eventually agreed to pay what he had originally promised and ultimately completed his purchase of Twitter in October 2022.
The billionaires are in separate negotiations to settle a civil lawsuit filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
It accuses him of waiting too long into 2022 to disclose his initial purchase of Twitter so he could buy more at lower prices before investors could see what he was doing.
