Jury decides Elon Musk not liable for shareholder losses after tweets with “funding security”.

Elon Musk is off the hook over his 2018 tweets claiming he “secured the funding” to take Tesla private for $420 a share. A jury found it was Musk not liable for Tesla investors’ losses after a week-long trial in San Francisco.

The verdict is a major victory for Musk, who could have been held liable for billions of dollars in damages. Musk testified in federal court that just because he tweeted something “doesn’t mean people believe it or act on it.” He also argued that he could have used his shares in SpaceX to fund the deal.

The shareholders who brought the class action lawsuit had argued that Musk’s statements about the funding were false and that they lost enormous amounts of money due to stock swings following Musk’s tweets. But while the judge in the case concluded that the tweets were “objectively false and reckless,” the jury did not find that Musk intentionally misled the public.