Musk Rips Twitter Verdict, Claims Jury’s $4.20 ‘Joke’ Mocked Him

Elon Musk’s lawyer says the billionaire didn’t get a fair trial because a San Francisco jury slipped a “bizarre and highly questionable” joke into a verdict form when it concluded he defrauded Twitter Inc. shareholders before acquiring the social media platform.

In a letter to the federal judge who oversaw the civil trial, attorney Alex Spiro pointed to the jury’s computation of how much Musk’s tweets depressed Twitter stock and how the panel highlighted just one number in blue ink — $4.20. The number 420 is cultural slang for pot smoking.

The jury found Friday Musk misled the investors in 2022 when he tweeted that Twitter — now called X — had too many fake accounts and then tried to back out of his $44 billion offer to buy the company. The investors who sued claimed Musk acted intentionally and they lost money when the shares fell. Musk’s legal team has vowed to appeal the verdict.

The eight-person panel found Musk liable to Twitter investors for misleading them with two tweets he posted in May 2022 stating concerns about the prevalence of fake accounts on the platform. Jurors rejected a claim in the class-action case that a third Musk statement violated federal securities law as well as an allegation that the billionaire waged a broader scheme to defraud investors.

Musk’s rare defeat in court — which could cost him billions of dollars — was a “mockery of justice,” Spiro said in the letter. He said the jury “used its verdict to mock Mr. Musk and the process” and made a “numerical joke.”

Back on Aug. 7, 2018, Musk caught the attention of federal securities regulators when he tweeted he had “funding secured” to take Tesla Inc. private at $420 a share. Musk, the world’s richest person, co-founded the electric-car maker and is its chief executive officer.

Tesla stock shot up, only to plummet when the serial entrepreneur later said the plan was abandoned. Some Tesla investors sued, but a San Francisco jury in that case cleared Musk in 2023 of wrongdoing.

In a separate US Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit over the Tesla tweet, the agency alleged Musk chose the $420 figure because he was trying to impress his then-girlfriend with a marijuana joke. The SEC settled that case, with Musk and Tesla agreeing to pay investors a combined $40 million without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

In his letter Thursday to the judge, Spiro didn’t specifically reference the Tesla tweet. Instead, he said the Twitter jury’s emphasis on $4.20 “appears to be a mocking reference to a number previously associated with Mr. Musk.”

Spiro claimed the figure “had no significance” to the damage determination and the verdict was “a commentary not on whether Mr. Musk committed securities fraud (he did not) but on the jury’s views about Mr. Musk himself.”

Lawyers for the investors who brought the case had accused Musk of publicly attacking Twitter to knock down its stock price so that he could buy the company for less than his original bid of $54.20 per share.

Twitter lost billions of dollars in market value that summer while Musk waffled on whether to go through with the deal, which he eventually did at the agreed price.

The amount of damages Musk must pay to individual investors will be determined at a later date when shareholders submit claims. An attorney for the investors said the final tab could reach $2.6 billion.

But as part of its verdict, the jury estimated the “amount of artificial deflation per share” of Twitter stock over about five months in 2022. The verdict sheet filed in court shows a chronological list of handwritten figures ranging from less than $3 to more than $8 for each trading day from May 13 through Oct. 3 of that year.

The Aug. 9 figure — $4.20 — stands out as the only one not in black ink.

“The jury’s bizarre and highly questionable method of completing the form, this “joke” (which was no doubt intentional), was just the final example in a parade of issues and events that illustrated and confirmed that Mr. Musk was deprived his right to a fair trial adjudicated by an impartial jury dedicated to finding the truth,” Spiro wrote.

The case is Pampena v. Musk, 22-cv-05937, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).