Elon Musk made misleading public statements during his 2022 Twitter takeover, a jury has found.
After two days of deliberations, a jury in San Francisco submitted an unanimous verdict in the case of Twitter investors who argued they had relied on his statements.
In his defence, Musk argued that he did not mislead investors and that they simply read too much into his public comments and tweets.
The jury did not agree. It found that his public claims of problems in Twitter’s user metrics, and the fact that he was possibly backing out of the acquisition deal, were intentionally misleading.
The BBC reports that the jury also found that Musk had artificially lowered the price of Twitter’s stock by a range of roughly $8 per share to $3 per share between May and October 2022 because of his public statements.
Elon Musk. Image: X
Musk faces litigation over Grok
The jury’s verdict comes as Musk faces litigation over X’s chatbot, Grok.
Last week, a lawsuit was filed after three teenagers discovered sexually explicit fake images of themselves that had allegedly been generated using Grok.
The lawsuit claims a Grok user altered images and videos of the plaintiffs without their knowledge, generating nude and explicit content.
Two of the plaintiffs are under 18, and all three are withholding their names to protect their privacy.
According to the complaint, the manipulated content included a high school yearbook image and was circulated on a Discord server, with similar altered images of at least 18 other girls who were minors.
Lawyers for the prosecution argue that xAI released the image-generation capability despite knowing it could be used to create such material, describing the altered imagery as “a rag doll brought to life through the dark arts”.
The complaint states: “xAI—and its founder Elon Musk— saw a business opportunity. They knew Grok could produce such results, including by using the images and videos of children, and publicly released it anyway.”
Top image: Elon Musk. Image: X