Musk Jury to Decide if Twitter Deal ‘On Hold’ Post Was Fraud

The question of whether Elon Musk defrauded Twitter Inc. investors went to an eight-person San Francisco jury Tuesday afternoon, who will decide if Musk can be held liable for a 2022 tweet that said his $44 billion agreement to buy the platform was “temporarily on hold,” causing the stock price to tumble.

Musk, the world’s richest person, could be on the hook for damages ranging in the billions of dollars, although the exact number likely wouldn’t be known immediately given the additional data that will be needed to calculate a total damages award.

“Mr. Musk’s tweets were not some innocent mistakes, some stupid tweet that he didn’t consider,” Mark Molumphy of Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy LLP told the jury during closing arguments Tuesday. “They were intentional, deliberate, and devised to convey to investors that Twitter was overrun with spam.”

“Mr. Musk literally had no proof for these tweets that he issued,” Molumphy added.

The jurors heard three weeks of live testimony from Musk and top Twitter executives, who recalled the turbulent six month period in 2022 when Musk flip-flopped over whether he would purchase the platform, resulting in hard fought litigation with Twitter’s board of directors to force Musk’s follow through.

The investors claimed during trial that Musk’s social media posts and public statements—including a May 13, 2022, tweet stating the deal was on hold pending a review of Twitter’s spam account numbers—was actually part of a deliberate plan to drive down the company’s stock price so he could renegotiate at a better price.

The trial included more than a day of live testimony from Musk, who largely stayed on script in telling the jury that he believed Twitter executives, including chief executive officer Parag Agrawal and financial officer Ned Segal, lied to him and in public financial statements about the percent of spam and fake accounts, known as bots, on the platform.

Musk testified that while the May 13 tweet at the heart of the case was not his “wisest,” he was always committed to the deal but had a genuine concern about resolving Twitter’s spam issue. Once he discovered that Twitter’s 5% spam number seemed to be based on little data and a flawed methodology, he began to have serious misgivings, he said.

“Of course people were talking about a renegotiation once this bot issue came up,” Musk’s attorney Michael Lifrak of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP told the jury during closing arguments. “There was no secret about that.”

The verdict form asks the jury to determine whether Musk made material false statements in either his May 13 tweet, in a later May 16 tweet, or in statements made during an interview with the “All-In” business and tech podcast. If he is found liable, the jury will then determine amount that Twitter’s stock was artificially deflated by Musk’s false statements for each day between May 13 and Oct. 3, 2022, when Musk agreed to buy the company at the original $54.20 per share agreement.

“Two tweets and a podcast does not equal securities fraud,” Lifrak said.

Musk has previously succeeded in fending off securities cases over his social media habits. Three years ago in the same federal court in San Francisco, a jury took only two hours of deliberation to clear him of wrongdoing when he tweeted in 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla Inc. private.

The case is Pampena v. Musk, N.D. Cal., No. 3:22-cv-05937, 3/17/26.