Elon Musk is going to court for his tweets about Tesla

Elon Musk, the troubled billionaire, is currently in court for a company he didnt take private while still dealing with the consequences of one he did

On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted that he had secured the financing for a 72 billion takeover of Tesla He later emphasised this claim in a statement that suggested a deal was close at hand

However, the buyout never happened, and Musk will now have to defend his actions in a federal court in San Francisco while being sworn in The trial was sparked by a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors who held Tesla stock for a 10-day period in August 2018 Jury selection for the trial will begin on Tuesday

A week later, after it became clear that Musk lacked the funding for a buyout after all, the rally in Teslas stock price that had been sparked by his tweets at the time abruptly came to an end

Because of that, he abandoned his plan to take the automaker private, which led to a 40 million settlement with American securities regulators and his removal as the chairman of the business

Since then, Musk has maintained that he entered that settlement under duress and that during meetings with officials from Saudi Arabias Public Investment Fund, he believed he had secured funding for a buyout of Tesla

The jurys interpretation of Musks motivation for tweets that US District Judge Edward Chen has already determined were false could determine the trials outcome

When Chen turned down Musks request to move the trial to Texas, where Tesla will move its headquarters in 2021, Chen dealt Musk another setback Musk had argued that the San Francisco Bay Area jury pool had been tainted by negative coverage of his purchase of Twitter

Teslas current stockholders are concerned that Musk has been spending less time managing the automaker at a time of escalating competition because of his leadership of Twitter, where he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers

These worries influenced Teslas stock to decline by 65 in 2018, wiping out more than 700 billion in shareholder wealth, a much larger loss than the 14 billion swing in fortune between the companys high and low stock prices during the period covered by the class-action lawsuit, which ran from August 7–17, 2018