Elon Musk takes stand in Tesla tweet fraud trial

• Tesla CEO Elon Musk testified in a California fraud trial on Friday.
• He was accused of lying about taking the automaker private and punishing investors in tweets.
• The multibillionaire’s tweets sent the Tesla stock price soaring, and he is being sued by disgruntled shareholders.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk testified in a California fraud trial on Friday, accused of lying about taking the automaker private and punishing investors in tweets.

Lawyers for disgruntled investors invited Musk to testify, accusing him of costing them millions of dollars in 2018 with false tweets about having funds secured to buy out shareholders at $420 per share.

The multibillionaire’s tweets sent the Tesla stock price soaring, and Musk was sued by shareholders who said he acted recklessly in an attempt to squeeze investors who had bet against the firm.

Musk, who purchased Twitter in October, downplayed the impact of his tweets, adding that he previously tweeted that he thought Tesla’s stock price was too high, and “it went higher, which is counter-intuitive.”

“What I’m trying to say is that the causal relationship is clearly not there simply because of a tweet,”  Musk said in a thirty-minute hearing that was to be extended on Monday.

The plaintiffs called Harvard Law and Business professor Guhan Subramanian as an expert witness, and the hearing began on Friday.

Musk’s tweeted proposal to take Tesla, private, was “illusory” and “simply wrong,” he said because it departed significantly from how such mega-deals typically go down.

All I can say is this is just wrong; as a matter of transaction process… this isn’t correct,” Subramanian said when questioned about Musk’s tweets by a defence lawyer.

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