US judge consider controversial Musk tweet on Tesla ‘false’: shareholder

A 2018 tweet posted by means of Elon Musk in which he claimed to have secured the funding to take Tesla, personally, become deemed “fake and deceptive” via a judge, according to files filed through traders suing his electric vehicle business enterprise.

The shareholders have accused Tesla of securities fraud over their stock market losses in the wake of the August 7, 2018 tweet, which precipitated the share price to vary wildly for several days.

In a courtroom submitting past due Friday, plaintiffs asked the federal choose in charge of the case, Edward Chen, to order Musk to forestall pronouncing publicly that he “secured” funding to take Tesla personal at $420 a percentage, as he again stated on Thursday.

In the past, the billionaire entrepreneur has said he was in talks at the time with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and that he was confident he would reach a deal. But no agreement was ever announced.

According to the filing, Chen recently concluded in an order not made public that Musk’s statements were “false and misleading,” and made “recklessly and with full awareness of the facts that he misrepresented in his tweets.”

Plaintiffs accused Musk of engaging in “a high-profile public campaign to present a contradictory and false narrative regarding his August 7, 2018 tweets” — which could influence eventual jurors assigned to the trial set for later this year.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the US market regulator, also charged him with fraud in the wake of the tweets.

He ultimately agreed to a deal to settle the expenses, which required Tesla’s legal professionals to check any social media posts with facts deemed “material” to shareholders.

He also paid a $20 million first-class and stepped down as Tesla’s chairman.

Musk, who has unveiled a $43 billion antagonistic takeover bid for Twitter, said Thursday he felt forced into the deal with the SEC to save Tesla.