SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Attorneys for Tesla shareholders suing electric car maker CEO Elon Musk over a misleading tweet are calling on a federal judge to deny the billionaire’s request to move the upcoming trial to Texas from California.
Musk argues that potential jurors in a federal court in San Francisco, where the four-year-old case was filed, will treat him unfairly.
But on Wednesday, lawyers for Tesla’s shareholders said there was no legal basis to postpone the upcoming trial, which revolves around an Aug. 7, 2018 tweet in which Musk indicated he had raised funding for a Tesla buyout deal. this was never implemented and led to a $40 million settlement with US securities regulators.
The lawyers also argued that Musk has only himself to blame for any negative perception, largely due to his frequent activity on Twitter, the social media platform he now owns and operates.
“For better or worse, Musk is a celebrity who gets media attention around the world,” attorneys for the shareholders wrote in their 19-page objection to the transfer request. – Only his Twitter footprint is partly to blame for this. If “negative” attention were all that was required to disqualify a pool of jurors, Musk would effectively be unable to be tried in front of a jury given his knack for attracting “negative” coverage.”
The filing comes less than a week after Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro asked US District Judge Edward Chen to move the case to Texas, the state where Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters in 2021 after spending almost 20 years in his original Silicon Valley home. If the trial is not rescheduled, Spiro is pushing for a delay in the start of jury selection, currently scheduled for Tuesday.
Lawyers for the shareholders noted that their lawsuit, filed in 2018, would never have been resolved in Texas federal court at the time because Musk’s buyout tweet was posted while Tesla was based in Palo Alto, California. What’s more, the witness list includes several former Tesla executives living in California who would be inappropriately uncomfortable if the trial was moved to Texas.
Chen scheduled a hearing for Friday to hear more arguments about Musk’s attempts to reschedule or delay the trial. The judge has already determined that Musk’s ransom tweet was false, leaving the jury to decide whether he acted recklessly by posting it and whether he caused financial harm to Tesla shareholders. After adjusting for two stock splits since 2018, Tesla shares are now worth almost six times what they were at the time of Musk’s sham buyout tweets.
While Musk has been hailed as a tech visionary in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, Spiro believes his reputation across the region has been badly tarnished by negative media coverage since he completed a $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October. Since then, Musk has fired or pushed away more than half of Twitter’s employees, while alienating users of the service with a policy that critics say has torn down the service’s barriers to misinformation and hateful content.
The backlash against the move, which Musk defended as moves to cut Twitter’s losses and protect free speech rights, increased the likelihood that potential jurors would be biased against him, Spiro said. Among other factors, Spiro cited the possibility that potential jurors drawn from the San Francisco Bay Area may have recently been fired from Twitter or may know someone who lost their job after Musk took office.
Shareholders’ lawyers cited about 200 jury questionnaires that were given to Chen to refute this argument. Only two or three potential jurors admitted to knowing someone who works on Twitter, lawyers said.
