Being one of the most despised men in America does come with a few downsides, it turns out.
As Elon Musk is set to stand trial in San Francisco’s federal court for allegedly manipulating Twitter’s stock, his legal team is discovering that it’s pretty hard to find impartial jurors who don’t “hate” the billionaire’s guts, according to new reporting from Courthouse News.
The judge Charles R. Breyer had to carefully present the conundrum to the over 90 prospective jurors.
“Whatever your opinion is on Mr. Musk, Twitter or Tesla, can you set it aside in the sense that you will judge the defendant based solely, emphasize solely, on the evidence produced in this trial and the law as I give it to you?” judge Breyer asked the prospective jury pool, as quoted by the outlet.
A particular lightning rod was Musk’s close ties to the Trump administration. Musk donated nearly $300 million to Trump’s presidential campaign, and led the administration’s effort to gut the federal government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a pet project of Musk’s.
“Even though you may have strong views on the presidency, this is not the forum where this is expressed,” Breyer emphasized. “Whatever your views of the presidency are, they are not going to influence your views in this case.”
According to the reporting, over a third of the prospective jurors said they couldn’t be impartial and were dismissed by the judge. Others that weren’t dismissed but apparently insisted they could still be impartial admitted they had a strongly negative opinion of Musk, too.
This sent Musk’s legal team fuming. His attorney Stephen Broome considered it an outrage that the court was potentially allowing jurors through who held a low opinion of his client. If it was any other defendant and a juror said “I hate that guy and he has no moral compass,” Broome argued, that juror would be dismissed.
Judge Breyer wasn’t buying it. Jurors, he reminded Broome, are allowed to have personal opinions on public figures, which Musk very much is. “He is a public figure, and as a public figure, he will excite views, strong views,” the judge said. “The question is whether or not they can set them aside.”
The trial, which is set to begin on March 2 and run through March 16, concerns accusations that Musk had manipulated the stock price of Twitter, later renamed X —and now improbably folded into SpaceX — while closing a $44 billion deal to buy the social media site. (That figure was widely seen as ludicrously overpriced; the company’s revenue was only several billion dollars and it had in recent years been operating at a loss.)
Musk did this, the plaintiffs argue, by deliberately making misleading statements about the platform. In May 2022, Musk tweeted to his hundreds of millions of followers that the deal was “on hold” pending calculations that “spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 percent of users,” suggesting that the percentage may actually be higher. Twitter’s share tumbled nine percent the following day.
If that could be interpreted as an honest slip-up, what came next was a brazen double down. A few days later, Musk claimed that bots and spam accounts made up an even larger 20 percent of Twitter’s user base, and demanded that Twitter show proof that it was less than the initial five percent claim. Critics at the time saw this as Musk finding an excuse to back out of the questionable $44 billion deal he had already agreed to, or to crash Twitter’s stock to close the deal at a lower price. Of the latter possibility, Musk said that at the time that renegotiating the deal at a lower price wasn’t “out of the question.”
The trial will proceed with nine jurors and no alternates, according to Courthouse News.
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