Musk criticizes judge after Twitter shareholder fraud loss
Elon Musk utilized his social media platform to criticize the judge involved in the trial he lost last week, where a jury determined that the billionaire had defrauded Twitter Inc. shareholders prior to acquiring the platform in 2022. “Probability of me getting a fair trial if this is how the judge dresses is 0.0 per cent,” Musk posted on what’s now known as X to his millions of followers. He shared a comment from another X account regarding Senior US District Judge Charles Breyer, featuring a smiling image of the 84-year-old judge adorned in his signature red bowtie. Musk’s lawyer expressed concerns in a letter to Breyer on Thursday, stating that the jury ridiculed the billionaire by including a “bizarre and highly questionable” joke in the verdict form for the civil trial. The jury emphasized the figure $4.20 while assessing the extent to which Musk’s tweets in 2022 had impacted Twitter’s stock price, which is central to the case. The number 420 serves as cultural slang for marijuana consumption.
A representative for the court where Breyer serves stated that judges refrain from commenting on specific cases. Breyer, the younger brother of retired US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, received his appointment to the court in 1997 from then-President Bill Clinton. Musk’s practice of targeting judges in cases that do not favor him is not a recent development. He has previously criticized the chief judge of the Delaware Chancery Court on X after she twice in 2024 voided his Tesla Inc. pay package — which was the largest executive compensation plan in US history when the electric-vehicle maker’s board awarded it to him in 2018. In February of that year, he stated that Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick “has done more damage to the state of Delaware than any judge in modern history.”
Musk continued to pursue the matter even after Delaware lawmakers altered the regulations governing investor litigation in the state’s business court, and Delaware’s supreme court reinstated his pay package in December. Earlier this week, Musk’s lawyers called on McCormick to recuse herself from other lawsuits she is managing that involve him and his companies, claiming she has consistently demonstrated bias against him. In the San Francisco case, an eight-person jury last Friday determined that Musk was liable to Twitter investors for misleading them with two tweets he posted in May 2022, expressing concerns about the prevalence of fake accounts on the platform. Jurors dismissed a claim in the class-action case asserting that a third statement by Musk breached federal securities law, along with an allegation that the billionaire orchestrated a wider scheme to deceive investors.
Throughout the trial, Breyer dismissed a plea from Musk’s attorneys for a mistrial. Their argument centered on the jury selection process, which had shown “animosity in the community toward Mr. Musk.” Following a letter from Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro to the judge on Thursday regarding the jury’s “joke” on the verdict form, the investors’ lawyers requested that Breyer remove Spiro’s letter from the record, deeming it improper. It was stated that it “does not even appear to seek any particular form of relief” and “is egregiously unfaithful to the record in this case.”
