The judiciary accuses Tesla CEO Elon Musk of making “false and misleading” statements that caused Tesla’s shares to stumble for a few days.
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The US Stock Exchange has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk
A document submitted by investors prosecuting Tesla showed that a judge deemed a 2018 tweet by the company’s president, Elon Musk, “false and misleading”, in which the president asserted that he had enough funding to take his company out of the stock market.
These investors have filed a lawsuit against the electric car maker and its president, Elon Musk, who they hold responsible for losing money after publishing this tweet that caused Tesla shares to falter for a few days.
In the document they filed on Friday, the investors said the judge in charge of the case ordered Elon Musk to stop publicly asserting that he had “already secured the funding” to pull the group off the stock exchange with a single share price of $420, which he did again during Thursday’s conference.
Musk confirmed in the past that at that time he was 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 provided by the investors, the judge finally concluded, in an undisclosed partial ruling, that “these assertions by Musk are false and misleading, and that Musk made these false statements recklessly, with full knowledge of the facts that he distorted in his tweets.”
Prosecutors consider that Musk started a public campaign to “present a contradictory and false version” of the tweet in question, which could affect 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 ordered him to hand over the chairmanship of Tesla’s board of directors and pay a $20 million fine, and later demanded that his tweets about Tesla’s business be pre-approved by a competent lawyer.
Elon Musk, who is currently looking to buy Twitter, appealed the latest move to a court in early March.