Published Fri, Mar 20 2026 5:50 PM EDT Updated 1 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. 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.