Elon Musk is being sued by investors over false claims he made in 2018 about taking Tesla private, which caused wild gyrations in the electric carmaker's stock price.
Elon Musk's fraud trial over a series of tweets about his electric car firm Tesla began on Wednesday. Investors are suing the CEO over claims he crashed the company's stock price by claiming he had secured financial backing to take the company private.
"We are here because Elon Musk, chairman and chief executive of Tesla, lied. His lies caused regular people like Glen Littleton to lose millions and millions of dollars," said Nicholas Porritt, a lawyer representing Tesla shareholders in the class-action case. The first witness called to the stand was Littleton, a 71-year-old investor from Kansas City in Missouri. He lost 75% of his Tesla portfolio after Musk's tweet alarmed him, triggering him to sell his stock at a significant loss.
Musk's lawyer, Alex Spiro, instead touted his client as a visionary who wrote the tweet in a momentary decision to be transparent. "He didn't plan to tweet this," Spiro said.
In 2018, Musk wrote on Twitter that he had found buyers willing to buyout shareholders for $72 million. He then fired off a follow-up tweet that made the deal seem like a foregone conclusion.
This caused the value of Tesla to skyrocket and then abruptly stop climbing when it became apparent that he did not have the amount of funding he claimed. Investors say this cheated them out of "billions" after the...
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