Attorneys for Musk declined to touch upon the decision.
The category motion lawsuit accused Musk of making deceptive statements to harm Twitter’s inventory value with the intent to renegotiate a less expensive value within the months it took to shut the deal.
The weekslong civil trial centered totally on statements he made in Could 2022, a month after signing the binding buy settlement, speculating that the variety of bots on Twitter was a lot increased than the corporate publicly reported and suggesting that the deal might be placed on pause because of this.
In Securities and Trade Fee filings on the time, Twitter reported that spam accounts made up about 5% of its day by day customers.
Testifying earlier this month, Musk stated that in early Could 2022, he requested then-CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal how the corporate decided that proportion, and didn’t get a transparent reply.
Days later, he tweeted that the deal was “briefly on maintain” pending that data.
Hours after that, he posted that he was “nonetheless dedicated to the acquisition,” however the next Monday, he tweeted once more, suggesting that as much as 20% of Twitter customers might be bots. Within the time between these posts, the corporate’s inventory dropped practically 18%.
On the stand, Musk stated he was solely talking his thoughts together with his tweets and had not supposed to control the market. He additionally maintained his perception that the corporate had misrepresented the variety of bots, saying at occasions he felt like as much as 90% of feedback on his posts have been from spam accounts.
He deflected blame for buyers’ misplaced earnings, saying that “if anyone had merely held on to their place … the huge variety of individuals benefited drastically from the acquisition.”
