Elon Musk took to his social media network to attack the judge in the trial he lost last week when a jury found the billionaire defrauded Twitter Inc. shareholders before acquiring the platform in 2022.
“Probability of me getting a fair trial if this is how the judge dresses is 0.0%,” Musk posted on what’s now known as X to his millions of followers. He was reposting a comment from another X account about Senior US District Judge Charles Breyer that included a smiling photo of the 84-year-old judge wearing his trademark red bowtie.
Musk’s lawyer complained in a letter to Breyer Thursday that the jury mocked the billionaire by slipping a “bizarre and highly questionable” joke into the verdict form for the civil trial. The jury highlighted the number $4.20 when computing how much Twitter stock’s price was depressed by Musk’s 2022 tweets at the heart of the case. The number 420 is cultural slang for pot smoking.
A spokesperson for the court where Breyer sits said judges do not comment on individual cases. Breyer, the younger brother of retired US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, was appointed to the court in 1997 by then-President Bill Clinton.
Targeting judges in cases that don’t go his way is not new for Musk. He has previously taken aim at the chief judge of the Delaware Chancery Court on X after she twice in 2024 voided his Tesla Inc. pay package — which was the biggest executive compensation plan in US history when the electric-vehicle maker’s board awarded it to him in 2018.
In February of that year he wrote that Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick “has done more damage to the state of Delaware than any judge in modern history.”
Musk didn’t let it rest even after Delaware lawmakers changed the ground rules for investor litigation in the state’s business court and Delaware’s supreme court reinstated his pay package in December.
Read More: Musk Deepens Feud With Delaware Judge, Alleging Bias on LinkedIn
Earlier this week, Musk’s lawyers urged McCormick to step aside from other lawsuits she is overseeing involving him and his companies, alleging she has repeatedly shown bias against him.
In the San Francisco case, an eight-person jury last Friday 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.
During the trial, Breyer rejected a request by Musk’s lawyers for a mistrial. They’d argued that the jury selection process had revealed “animosity in the community toward Mr. Musk.”
After Musk lawyer Alex Spiro wrote to the judge Thursday about the jury’s “joke” on the verdict form, lawyers for the investors urged Breyer to strike Spiro’s letter from the record as improper. They said it “does not even appear to seek any particular form of relief” and “is egregiously unfaithful to the record in this case.”
To contact the reporter on this story:
Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Molly Smith at msmith604@bloomberg.net
Peter Blumberg, Steve Stroth
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