Elon Musk muss Milliarden schulden, nachdem die Jury feststellt, dass er Twitter-Investoren vor der Übernahme in die Irre geführt hat

Some highlights below:

>Elon Musk has been found liable for attempting to drive down Twitter’s stock price ahead of his $44 billion takeover of the company four years ago, a federal jury in San Francisco decided Friday.
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>Attorneys said the world’s wealthiest person will owe an estimated $2.1 billion in damages to former shareholders in the company, who say they lost out on earnings when they sold their stocks at deflated prices amid Musk’s public waffling over his 2022 acquisition deal.
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>“The jury’s verdict sends a strong message that just because you’re a rich and powerful person, you still have to obey the law and no man is above the law,” attorney Mark Molumphy, who represented the shareholders, said after the verdict was read Friday.
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>On the stand, Musk said he was only speaking his mind with his tweets and had not intended to manipulate the market. He also maintained his belief that the company had misrepresented the number of bots, saying at times he felt like up to 90% of comments on his posts were from spam accounts.
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>He deflected blame for investors’ lost earnings, saying that “if somebody had simply held on to their position … the vast number of people benefited greatly from the acquisition.”
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>Molumphy told reporters on Friday that the verdict was a victory not only for shareholders but also for Twitter as a company.
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>“He was basically saying the company was a sham,” he said. Before Musk’s takeover, he said, “Twitter was an important institution in San Francisco. It was not a sham; it was a real company, and the way he dragged it through the mud in order to basically get a better deal was atrocious.”
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>Attorneys believed the ruling was the first time a jury had held Musk liable for his statements on Twitter.

Although this will likely not materially impact his bottom line, it’s still good that there’s at least some measure of accountability attached here. It will be interesting to see if this has any impacts on other public figures making similar statements or commentary on social media.

Apartheid Clyde’s current net worth is estimated at $850B.

A $2.1B slap on the wrist. And the damage is done.

Good. But it’s not enough

He’ll buy an appeal. Some judge is about to get rich.

His defense was telling the people he manipulated that they should’ve just trusted him. That’s not a legal argument, that’s what every con artist says after getting caught.

just make him pay taxes

Unfortunate that something like this is only brought to light when it affects other wealthy shareholders. What about the average person who has been fucked over by his companies and actions?

They need to look at Jack Dorsey. I do not like Elon and think he is an asshole as a person and deplorable as a billionaire. But he tried to back out of the deal, and Dorsey knew that was the only chance he was going to be able to exit and essentially forced the sale. Elon then went on to basically destroy the company’s reputation and product offering. I mean, he even renamed it. Some parts of that destructive activity were out of spite, and some of it is surely tied to the devaluation effort.

Tag Elon for this and everything else he deserves to be held liable for since then; including the DOGE disaster. However, the sequence of events and players involved leading up to the purchase should be examined more thoroughly.