Shareholders insult Elon Musk's attempt to postpone the Tesla buyback prosecution

Lawyers for Tesla shareholders suing the electric vehicle maker’s CEO Elon Musk over a misleading tweet are urging a federal judge to reject the billionaire’s request to move an upcoming trial to Texas from California

Musk contends he will be treated unfairly by potential jurors in the San Francisco federal court where the 4-year-old case was filed

However, Tesla shareholders attorneys asserted in a Wednesday filing that there are no legal grounds to move the upcoming trial, which revolves around Musks Aug 7, 2018 tweet in which he indicated he had lined up financing for a Tesla buyout, a deal that never materialised and resulted in a 40 million settlement with US securities regulators

The lawyers also argued Musk only has himself to blame for any negative perceptions, largely because of his frequent activity on Twitter, the social media platform that he now owns and runs

For better or worse, Musk is a celebrity who attracts global media attention, the shareholders attorneys wrote in their 19-page opposition to the transfer request His Twitter footprint alone is partially to blame for this If all that was required to disqualify a jury pool was negative attention, Musk would effectively be untriable before a jury given his proclivity for attracting negative coverage

The filing comes less than a week after Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, asked US District Judge Edward Chen to transfer the case to Texas, the state where Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters in 2021 after spending nearly 20 years in its original Silicon Valley home If the trial isn’t transferred, Spiro is pushing for a delay of the start of jury selection, currently scheduled for Tuesday

The shareholders’ attorneys noted that their lawsuit, filed in 2018, would have never been allowed in a Texas federal court at that time because Musk’s buyout tweet occurred while Tesla was based in Palo Alto, California What’s more, a list of witnesses includes several former Tesla executives living in California who would be improperly inconvenienced if the trial were moved to Texas

Chen has scheduled a hearing for Friday to hear further arguments about Musk’s effort to move or delay the trial The judge already has determined that Musk’s buyout tweet was false, leaving it to a jury to decide whether he acted recklessly by posting it and whether it caused financial harm to Tesla shareholders

After adjusting for two stock splits made since 2018, Tesla’s shares are now worth nearly six times more than at the time of Musk’s tweets about the bogus buyout

Although Musk for years has been hailed in the San Francisco Bay Area as a technology visionary, Spiro believes his reputation has been badly tarnished throughout the region by negative media coverage since he completed his 44 billion purchase of Twitter in October Since then, Musk has laid off or pushed away more than half of Twitter’s workforce, while alienating the service’s users with policies that critics contend have dismantled the service’s guardrails against misinformation and hateful content