Elon Musk misled Twitter investors ahead of $44 billion acquisition, jury says
Last edited Fri Mar 20, 2026, 06:34 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: CNBC
Published Fri, Mar 20 2026 5:50 PM EDT Updated 11 Min Ago
A jury in California found that Elon Musk misled Twitter shareholders during the runup to his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company, according to a verdict issued on Friday. Total damages could reach up to $2.6 billion, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.
The class action lawsuit, Pampena v. Musk, was originally filed in October 2022, after Musk completed his purchase of Twitter for $54.20 per share. He later renamed the company X, before merging it with his artificial intelligence company xAI, and then with SpaceX, his reusable rocket manufacturer.
“This is a great example of what you cannot do to the average investor -- people that have 401ks, kids, pension funds, teachers, firemen, nurses,” Joseph Cotchett, an attorney for the Twitter investors, told CNBC at the San Francisco courthouse. “That’s what this case was all about. This was not about Musk. It was about the whole operation.”
Attorneys for Musk declined to comment. His team is expected to file an appeal.
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/20/elon-musk-determined-to-be-liable-for-misleading-twitter-investors.html
Article updated.
Original article -
A jury in California found that Elon Musk misled Twitter shareholders during the runup to his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company, according to a verdict issued on Friday. Musk, the world’s richest person, was cleared of some fraud allegations. Total damages could reach up to $2.6 billion, the attorneys for the plaintiffs said.
The class action lawsuit, Pampena v. Musk, was originally filed in October 2022, after Musk completed his purchase of Twitter for $54.20 per share. He later renamed the company X, before merging it with his artificial intelligence company xAI, and then with SpaceX, his reusable rocket manufacturer.
After Musk bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, his sentiment towards the deal quickly soured as he cast doubt on the company’s claimed level of bots, spam and fake accounts on its platform. Musk wrote in a tweet the following month that his acquisition was “temporarily on hold” until Twitter’s CEO could prove its inauthentic account levels were around the 5% reported in the company’s SEC filings.
Musk’s tweets and additional comments sent shares of Twitter sliding by almost 10% in a single session. Former Twitter shareholders, including retail investors and options traders, argued that Musk’s flip-flopping amounted to a scheme to pressure the company’s board to sell to him for a lower price than his original offer. They claimed he was motivated by stock price declines at Tesla, which would require him to sell even more shares in the automaker than he’d intended in order to finance the buyout.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Musk did some clearly illegal/fraudulent acts in the acquisition of twitter. There is also litigation pending brought by the SEC against Musk for violation of the securities laws. Musk defrauded shareholders in order to lower the price that Musk paid for twitter.
Link to tweet
https://abc7ny.com/post/jury-finds-elon-musk-misled-investors-during-twitter-purchase-absolves-fraud-claims/18742586/
The civil trial in San Francisco centered on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X. 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's statements.
The nine-person jury returned the verdict after 3 days of deliberation, nearly three weeks after the trial began on March 2. They said that while Musk was liable for misleading investors with two tweets - including one said the Twitter deal was "temporarily on hold," he did not do so with a statement he made on a podcast and that he did not intentionally "scheme" to defraud investors.
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. The jury awarded shareholders between about $3 and $8 per stock per day