Catenaa, Saturday, March 21, 2026- A US court said that Elon Musk defrauded Twitter shareholders during the run-up to his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.
The class action lawsuit, Pampena v. Musk, was originally filed in October 2022, after Musk completed his purchase of Twitter for $54.20 per share.
He later renamed the company X, before merging it with his artificial intelligence company xAI, and then with SpaceX, his reusable rocket manufacturer.
Total damages could reach up to $2.6 billion, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.
“This is a great example of what you cannot do to the average investor — people that have 401ks, kids, pension funds, teachers, firemen, nurses,” Joseph Cotchett, an attorney for the Twitter investors, told CNBC at the San Francisco courthouse. “That’s what this case was all about. This was not about Musk. It was about the whole operation.”
In an emailed statement, Musk’s attorneys with Quinn Emanuel said, “We view today’s verdict, where the jury found both for and against the plaintiffs and found no fraud scheme, as a bump in the road. And we look forward to vindication on appeal.”
After Musk bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, his sentiment towards the deal quickly soured as he cast doubt on the company’s claimed level of bots, spam, and fake accounts on its platform.
Musk wrote in a tweet the following month that his acquisition was “temporarily on hold” until Twitter’s CEO could prove its inauthentic account levels were around the 5% reported in the company’s SEC filings.
Musk’s tweets and additional comments sent shares of Twitter sliding by almost 10% in a single session.
The jury deliberated for four days and unanimously found that Musk’s tweets on May 13 and May 17 were materially false or misleading.
