Elon Musk Doesn't Appeal to Potential Jurors

Elon Musk is not a popular man in the San Francisco Bay Area

When a sampling of about 200 of its residents was asked to opine on Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc and Twitter Inc, about 60 said they viewed him negatively The numbers are even more lopsided when you consider only the 142 people in the sample who said they have an opinion about the billionaire

More than 80 of those people don’t like Musk – and they’re not shy about saying so Indeed, they proclaim their distaste for the Tesla chief “proudly and vividly”

Because Musk’s own lawyers said so, in a last-ditch attempt to transfer or at least delay a rare securities class action trial that’s scheduled to begin next week before US District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco

The statistics I quoted come from a brief filed on Thursday night by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Sullivan, which is defending Musk and Tesla against shareholders’ allegations that they were defrauded when Musk tweeted in April 2018 that he had “funding secured” for a deal to take the company private at a price of 420 per share

The 200 people who responded to questions about Musk are prospective jurors who were asked for their views of Musk in a pretrial questionnaire Quinn Emanuel’s brief is redacted, so we can’t see prospective jurors’ specific quotes about the Tesla and Twitter CEO, but based on Quinn’s language, it sounds like some of the would-be jurors are quite outspoken in their criticism

Two apparently said, among other things, that Musk should stop tweeting altogether The defense brief insisted that the questionnaires prove Tesla and Musk cannot receive a fair hearing from jurors in Northern California

Chen denied the transfer motion at a hearing on Friday, which means Tesla and Musk realized no immediate benefit from Quinn Emanuel’s revelations about just how disliked Musk is among members of the jury pool

Tesla defense lawyers Alex Spiro, Andrew Rossman and Michael Lifrak didn’t respond to my email query asking whether Musk is aware of jurors’ opinions of him and whether the Tesla CEO had approved the brief disclosing jurors views It’s hard to imagine that even a celebrity billionaire wouldn’t be at least a bit distressed to read the brief’s depiction of a jury pool that is passionate in its distaste for him