Musk Faces New Setback in Lawsuits Over 2022 Twitter Buyout (1)

Twitter shareholders gained traction in another lawsuit against Elon Musk over the run up to his 2022 buyout of the social media platform, with a judge granting class-action status to the investors.

The investors claim they were harmed when Musk secretly amassed more than 13 million in Twitter shares over 11 days starting on March 25, 2022. US District Judge Andrew Carter in New York ruled the investors can sue together in a single case, amplifying their leverage to force a settlement or go forward to trial.

The judge cited the investors’ claims of his late filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, his alleged posting of “misleading tweets about Twitter’s future” and “a coordinated trading strategy to silently build up” his position in the social media company. The case was filed in April 2022.

A spokesman for Musk’s lawyers in the case declined to comment.

Earlier this month, in a separate investor lawsuit in San Francisco a jury found Musk misled the investors in 2022 when he tweeted that Twitter — now called X — had too many fake accounts and then tried to back out of his $44 billion offer to buy the company. The investors who sued claimed Musk acted intentionally and they lost money when the shares fell. Musk’s legal team has vowed to appeal the verdict.

Jurors in the San Francisco case found Musk liable to Twitter investors for misleading them with two tweets he posted in May 2022 stating concerns about the prevalence of fake accounts on the platform. Jurors rejected a claim in the class-action case that a third Musk statement violated federal securities law as well as an allegation that the billionaire waged a broader scheme to defraud investors.

(Updates with lawyers for Musk declining to comment in fourth paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Elizabeth Wasserman, Peter Blumberg

© 2026 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Used with permission.