A document submitted by investors prosecuting Tesla showed that a judge considered Elon Musk’s tweet in which he asserted in 2018 that he had enough funding to take his company out of the stock market, as “false and misleading.”
These investors have filed a lawsuit once morest the electric car maker and its president, Elon Musk, who they hold responsible for losing money following publishing this tweet, which caused Tesla shares to falter for a few days.
In the document they submitted Friday and was seen by AFP on Saturday, the investors said the judge in charge of the case had ordered Elon Musk to stop publicly asserting that he had “already received the funding” to pull the group off the stock exchange with a share price of $420, which he did once more in an interview. With “Ted Talk” last Thursday.
Musk confirmed in the past that he was at that time in discussions with the Public Investment Fund in Saudi Arabia and that he was confident of the outcome of these negotiations. But no deal was ever announced.
According to the document submitted by the investors, the judge finally concluded, in a partial ruling that was not disclosed, that “these assertions by Musk are false and misleading, and that Musk made these false statements recklessly and with full knowledge of the facts that he distorted in his tweets.”
Prosecutors consider Musk to have started a public campaign to “present a contradictory and false version” of the tweet in question, which might influence the jury in the trial scheduled for May.
The US Stock Exchange had also filed a complaint at the time, claiming that Musk had not provided evidence of his financing.
The regulator also forced him to hand over the chairmanship of Tesla’s board of directors and pay a fine of $20 million, and later demanded that his tweets regarding Tesla’s activity be pre-approved by a specialized lawyer. Elon Musk, who is currently looking to buy Twitter, appealed the latest move in a court in early March. (AFP)
