A current civil lawsuit in San Francisco has turned to a loss, as Elon Musk has been found liable for defrauding shareholders. The accusation is that Musk orchestrated a fall in stock prices as to position himself better for the 2022 takeover, which ended up costing him $44 billion.
The method used was relatively simply, as Musk simply claimed on other social media that Twitter had deliberately not been honest about how many fake accounts, including accounts made with only spamming in mind, were on the platform, and thus that the official reports on this were showing numbers that were way too low, with the intent of hurting the stock value as fewer real users equal less value.
According to Reuters, the lawyer of the shareholders, Francis Bottini, claimed the damages amounted to $2.5 billion. Bottini pointed out that as the richest man in the world, a mere tweet from Musk could directly affect markets, and argued that he should be held responsible for the harm he had done to the (Twitter) investors. Musk's team has already stated that they will appeal.
Musk has a pretty good trial record recently, including winning a fraud case about securing funding for Tesla in 2023, and a case about his own salary just last year. The current case stems from three specific statements about Twitter being overrun by bots, with one statement already being removed, with the other two concerning the number of robots, the most famous one claiming that the number of bot accounts could be much higher than 20% of twitter users. The case has been going on for or three weeks so far.