Update at 6:15 pm ET: The jury sided with Elon Musk in a ruling issued about two hours after closing arguments on Friday.
"A jury rejected investor claims that Elon Musk violated federal securities law when he tweeted in 2018 about potentially taking Tesla private, handing a major win to the billionaire chief executive," The Wall Street Journal reported. "The nine-person jury said the investors who brought the class-action case failed to prove that Mr. Musk hurt them by tweeting about a possible deal."
Original story: The class-action trial over Elon Musk's false "funding secured" tweets ended today with closing arguments. A nine-member federal jury now must decide whether Musk and Tesla should have to pay damages to investors who lost money after Musk falsely claimed in August 2018 that he had secured funding to take Tesla private.
"To Elon Musk, if he believes it—or even just thinks about it—then it's true, no matter how objectively false or exaggerated it may be," plaintiff's attorney Nicholas Porritt said today. "Now it may work in his businesses—that's not an issue for this trial. But it does not work in the securities markets, for public companies. The securities markets have rules governing what you can and cannot say, and one of those basic rules is that what you say must be true and accurate."
Musk lawyer Alex Spiro blamed investors for their losses today, accusing them of "gambling and looking for lawsuits as insurance."
Judge Edward Chen already ruled that...
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