$44 Billion Takeover : Musk Found Liable To Twitter Shareholders In Fraud Lawsuit

21st March 2026 at 1:56 PM

1 minute read

New York : A U.S. federal jury found Elon Musk liable on Friday for claims he defrauded Twitter shareholders by trying to drive down the social media company’s stock price. The verdict from a jury in San Francisco federal court came in a closely watched civil trial where Musk, the world’s richest person, was accused of falsely claiming on social media.

Musk’s status as the world’s richest man is not a free pass, Bottini said in a statement. If you’re able to move markets with your tweets you’re responsible for the harm you cause to investors. In a joint statement, Musk’s lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan called the verdict “a bump in the road. This included a 2023 trial in San Francisco over whether he defrauded Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab shareholders who claimed to suffer losses after he falsely claimed in 2018 to have “funding secured” to take the electric car company private, and litigation in Delaware over his $139 billion Tesla pay package.

Twitter shareholders challenged three statements Musk made not long after agreeing in April 2022 to buy Twitter, where he questioned whether the company was overrun with bots. One said the purchase was “temporarily on hold” pending confirmation that bots represented less than 5% of users. The other said the percentage of bots could be “much” higher than 20%, and the takeover could not go forward unless Twitter’s chief executive proved the percentage was less than 5%.

Musk’s rocket and space exploration company SpaceX bought his artificial intelligence company xAI, which housed X. The purchase created the world’s most valuable private company, worth about $1.25 trillion at the time.