Elon Musk is cleared of wrongdoing for tweeting had 'funding secured' to take Tesla private, avoiding billions in damages
A jury has decided Elon Musk didn’t deceive investors with tweets in 2018.
The verdict by the nine jurors was reached after less that two hours of deliberation following a three-week trial.
The trial pitted Tesla investors represented in a class-action lawsuit against Musk, who is CEO of both the electric automaker and the Twitter service he bought for for $44 billion a few months ago.
In 2018, Musk tweeted that he had the financing to take Tesla private even though it turned out he hadn’t gotten an iron-clad commitment for an aborted deal that would have cost $20 billion to $70 billion to pull off.
It’s a major vindication for Musk, whose integrity was at stake as well part of a fortune that has established him as one of the world’s richest people. He could have been saddled with a bill for billions of dollars in damages had the jury found him liable for the 2018 tweets that had already been deemed falsehoods by the judge presiding over the trial.
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