In a trial in San Francisco on Friday, a jury found that Elon Musk and Tesla were not to blame for a tweet Musk sent in 2018 in which he said he had “funding secured” to take the electric car company private.
Musk’s tweets about business have been all over the place over the years. Sometimes he got away with it by saying they were just social media posts, and sometimes he got in trouble with the law.
Musk tweeted in August 2018 that he had “secured funding” to take Tesla private at $420 per share.
Since then, Musk has said (including during the trial in a federal court in San Francisco) that he thought Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had agreed to back the project and that getting money wouldn’t be a problem anyway.
Still, investors sued him and Tesla for fraud, saying he made the public claims on purpose or by accident and caused them to lose money on their investments.
