The civil trial in San Francisco centers on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X, in October 2022, six months after agreeing to buy the embattled company for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. The price represents a sliver of the Tesla CEO’s fortune, now estimated at $839 billion.

Much of the trial focused on Musk’s claims about the number of bots on Twitter. Musk testified, as he long contended, that Twitter had a much higher number of fake and spam accounts than the 5% it disclosed in regulatory filings. He used what he called Twitter’s misrepresentation of the number of fake accounts on its service as a reason to retreat from the purchase.

The civil trial in San Francisco centers on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Elon Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X, in October 2022. Musk in court earlier this month. AP

After Musk tried to back out, Twitter went to court in Delaware to force him to honor his original deal. Just before that case was scheduled to go to trial, Musk reversed course again and agreed to pay what he had originally promised.

Mark Molumphy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, asked jurors to hold Musk accountable and compensate thousands of investors who lost money because of tweets Musk sent, including one from May 13, 2022, that said the deal was “on hold.”

“He knew what he was doing,” Molumphy said.

The plaintiffs argue that, as Tesla’s stock price declined and buying Twitter became too expensive for Musk, he tweeted statements that drove down the stock price in the hopes he could renegotiate the deal for a lower price or get out of it altogether.

Musk’s tweets, the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued, were not some “innocent mistake” or a “stupid tweet” off the top of his head, but carefully calculated to drive down’s Twitter’s stock price.

Michael Lifrak, a lawyer for Musk, however, countered that the plaintiffs did not present “one shred of evidence” to show that Musk purposely plotted to drive down Twitter’s stock price. He reminded the jury that according to their instructions, even motive and intent to commit fraud is not enough to prove that actual fraud has taken place.

Plaintiffs argued Musk’s tweets drove down the stock price in the hopes he could renegotiate the deal for a lower price or get out of it altogether. Getty Images

Lifrak also said there’s “zero evidence” that Tesla’s stock price decline during the time he was in the process of buying Twitter was the issue.

Everyone “wants to pay less and not more,” he said, adding that “you can’t just say” he wanted a lower price and therefore he committed fraud.

The problem of bots and fake accounts on Twitter wasn’t new at the time Musk negotiated the deal. The company had paid $809.5 million in 2021 to settle claims it was overstating its growth rate and monthly user figures. Twitter also disclosed its bot estimates to the Securities and Exchange Commission for years while also cautioning that its estimate might be too low.

But Musk claimed the number was much higher, at least 20% according to some analysts. Saying the bot number was at least this high was like “saying the grass is green or the sky is blue,” Musk said.

Michael Lifrak, a lawyer for Musk, however, said the plaintiffs did not present “one shred of evidence” to show that Musk purposely plotted to drive down Twitter’s stock price. AP

Twitter’s former CFO Ned Segal disputed this claim and said on the witness stand that the number was actually closer to 1%.

Asked if Twitter ever filed false filings to the SEC that misstated its spam numbers, Segal said it did not. But he mentioned that the company once restated its finances after it became aware of a mistake in its calculation of daily users. In 2017, Twitter said it had been overstating its monthly user numbers by mistake because it was including users of a third-party app it should not have.

Molumphy showed jurors tweets Musk sent before he agreed to buy Twitter, including ones from 2020 complaining about the number of fake accounts on the platform. He also referred to Musk’s testimony from last week, where, when he was asked whether he thought Twitter was “exaggerating” their user numbers before signing the deal, Musk replied, “Yes.”

Musk holding a sink in 2022 at Twitter’s San Francisco office. Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP

Referring to Musk’s May 13 tweet of the deal being “on hold” that’s become central to the case, Lifrak, his lawyer, used visual aids to try to make it clear to the jury that it was not a false statement. First, he showed a screen with the words “people who said the tweet was false at the time:” with a blank space underneath. A second screen said “people who said the tweet was false at the trial:” with another blank space underneath.

He also addressed animosity toward Musk, and urged jurors, who hail from around the Bay Area not to “fall for a San Francisco us vs. Elon Musk dynamic.”

“He may tweet stupid things,” Lifrak said. “But this isn’t a stupid tweeter trial.”

Rather, “it’s a trial on whether this man committed securities fraud and whether they proved it — and they didn’t.”

Much of the trial focused on Musk’s claims about the number of bots on Twitter. AFP via Getty Images

On Monday, the two sides met to go over instructions to the jury. Judge Charles R. Breyer noted that many in the jury pool had negative views on Musk. But, he added, a person who is “not universally liked” still deserves a fair trial, and should not be treated in a discriminatory or prejudicial way.

Musk, however, seems to already contend he hasn’t been treated fairly in the courtroom and earlier this month filed a motion for a mistrial, saying he has been deprived of his right to a fair trial because of the plaintiffs’ — and in some cases the judge’s — conduct.

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May 1, 2025, 11:42am

“Why I’m leaving Twitter” is, at this point, an irritating genre of post. Nonetheless, it’s important to go on record in the face of Elon Musk’s vacuous amorality and its concomitant amplification of actual Nazis (not to mention his relentlessly inept destruction of American government as oligarch-in-chief).

Look, the guy is bad, and his platform is bad, and most of the people on his platform are bad. We no longer want to provide free content and engagement to a deranged billionaire and his dysfunctional little clubhouse. I understand the argument that we shouldn’t cede our space in the public square to the bad people, to which I respond: How is a privately owned, algorithmically driven digital service, that suppresses speech it doesn’t like and amplifies speech (often hateful) that it does, anything like a true public square? To take the analogy further: If all your friends have left the town square, and it’s full of hateful morons with the loudest bullhorns, who just want to sell you fallout shelter supplies and dick pills, wouldn’t you leave? 

So that’s why we’ve left Twitter (see below for our last post, if you don’t want to actually visit the site). 

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The email landed in employees’ inboxes with the subject line: “Fork in the Road.” The message in the email was stark: Accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign.

That was the note that millions of federal employees received around 5 p.m. on Tuesday. It echoed a similar message that thousands of workers at Twitter got from Elon Musk in late 2022 after he bought the company.

Mr. Musk has brought his takeover tactics from Twitter to the federal government, where he’s become a close adviser to President Trump and is running the cost-cutting initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency. The administration is already eliminating diversity initiatives, testing engineering prowess and demanding federal employee loyalty, maneuvers Mr. Musk embraced to slash his social media company’s budget and operations.

The Tuesday email, sent by the Office of Personnel Management, was the latest example of the billionaire’s fingerprints, down to the subject line — the same as his 2022 buyout offer to Twitter employees.

“It’s a knife-at-your-throat feeling,” said Rumman Chowdhury, a former Twitter executive who left the company, which is now known as X, after Mr. Musk’s takeover. “The uncertainty is wild.”

Mr. Musk and a spokeswoman for his government cost-cutting initiative did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Musk has previously said he expects to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. Between 5 and 10 percent of federal workers were expected to accept the exit packages offered on Tuesday, “which could lead to around $100 billion in savings,” Mr. Musk’s political action committee, America PAC, said in a post on X.

Mr. Musk, who also leads Tesla and SpaceX, has enlisted the help of a team of loyalists to assess agencies and make cuts, the same thing he did during the Twitter takeover.

Steve Davis, the head of Mr. Musk’s tunneling startup, The Boring Company, helped oversee cost-cutting at Twitter and now leads DOGE Brian Bjelde, a longtime human resources executive at SpaceX who also helped during the Twitter takeover, is now an adviser to the Office of Personnel Management.

Michael Grimes, a top banker at Morgan Stanley who helped lead Mr. Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is expected to take a senior job at the Commerce Department.

One of Mr. Musk’s software engineers at Tesla, Thomas Shedd, was named the head of “Technology Transformation Services” at the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies. Mr. Shedd promptly employed a Musk tactic: asking for proof of engineers’ technical chops.

Mr. Shedd asked for engineers to sign up for sessions in which they could share “a recent individual technical win,” according to an email sent to more than 700 employees on Tuesday night and viewed by The Times.

“These sessions are an opportunity to understand more deeply the types of expertise we have,” Mr. Shedd said in his email, which emphasized his “hours on the factory floor” at Tesla.

Just a day after acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk demanded engineers print out and share code they had written for the company’s various products.

Mr. Musk also worked quickly to undo diversity initiatives at the social media company — a move echoed by Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive orders his first week in office, which eliminated diversity and inclusion efforts in the federal government.

“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” according to emails sent to federal workers viewed by The Times.

After buying Twitter, Mr. Musk slammed previous management’s attempts to foster diversity, sharing a video in which he mocked shirts made for the company’s Black employee group. Under his leadership, the company cut funding for employee resource groups, and took down a mural celebrating the Black Lives Matter movement in its San Francisco office, according to two former employees.

One of Mr. Musk’s go-to tactics for cutting costs at Twitter was reducing the company’s real estate footprint. He stopped paying rent for various office spaces around the world, leading to evictions from several facilities, including in Seattle and Boulder, Colo.

The General Services Administration is also targeting real estate for cost-cutting. Stephen Ehikian, a former tech executive and Trump appointee, told workers in an email on Tuesday viewed by The Times that two of the agency’s properties would be listed for sale while three leases had been terminated. The move would save about $11 million and was a “first step” in slashing real estate expenditures, according to the email.

While Mr. Musk ultimately transformed Twitter, reducing staff by 80 percent and minimizing its real estate footprint, its business has declined. Advertisers have fled the site in droves, and at least one investor, Fidelity, estimates the company is now worth 72 percent less than the $44 billion he paid for it.

“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive and we’re barely breaking even,” Mr. Musk wrote in an email to X employees earlier this month, which was viewed by The New York Times and previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. “We need to be faster, more innovative and relentlessly focused.”

Mr. Musk on Tuesday evening resurfaced one of his 2024 posts on X, appearing to reference the “fork in the road” email to federal employees, which demanded that they be “reliable, loyal, trustworthy” and “strive for excellence.”

Some government workers are looking to former Twitter employees for guidance.

Several federal employees circulated online posts from Dr. Chowdhury offering advice about how to respond to a Musk takeover. Others contacted Shannon Liss-Riordan, an employment lawyer who is suing Mr. Musk on behalf of former Twitter workers.

“Elon clearly thinks he learned from Twitter how to decimate a workplace and he’s trying to roll out the same playbook with the federal government now,” Ms. Liss-Riordan said.

Theodore Schleifer, Ana Swanson and Maureen Farrell contributed reporting.

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In a complaint filed in Washington, DC, federal court, the SEC said the delay allowed Musk to continue buying Twitter shares at artificially low prices, allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million.

A lawyer for Musk said the billionaire did nothing wrong and called the SEC case a “sham.”

The SEC wants Musk — who has since rebranded Twitter to X — to pay a civil fine and disgorge profits he was not entitled to.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, in an email said: “Mr. Musk has done nothing wrong and everyone sees this sham for what it is.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk for having failed to timely disclose purchasing more than 5% of Twitter’s common stock in March 2022 Getty Images

The Wall Street sheriff had approached the world’s richest man with a take-it-or-leave-it settlement offer to pay an eye-popping $263 million in early December, giving Musk 48 hours to respond, sources close to the situation told The Post.

Musk revealed the settlement talks in a Dec. 12 post on X and brushed off the demand, but never said how much Gensler was seeking.

“Oh Gary, how could you do this to me?” Musk wrote in the Dec. 12 post.

The SEC declined to comment beyond the suit.

The lawsuit comes less than three weeks after Spiro told the SEC that the $263 million settlement offer was an “exorbitant and unprecedented amount,” according to a letter the lawyer sent to the agency that was viewed by The Post.

The SEC said the delay allowed Musk to continue buying Twitter shares at artificially low prices, allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million. REUTERS

“For the SEC staff to recommend that the Commission authorize a litigated action to seek over $263 million in monetary relief in a case in which the staff acknowledges that they are not alleging intent, willfulness, or investor harm is inherently improper and punitive,” Spiro alleged in the Dec. 27 letter.

An SEC rule requires investors like Musk to disclose within 10 calendar days when they cross a 5% ownership threshold.

The SEC said Musk did not disclose his stake until April 4, 2022, 11 days after the deadline, by which time he owned more than 9% of Twitter’s shares.

Twitter’s share price rose more than 27% following that disclosure, the SEC said.

Musk eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, and renamed it X.

Spiro admitted that Musk was late with the so-called 13(d) filing to the SEC, according to his letter.

But he took issue with the SEC’s demand of $178 million for the late filing, $45 million in interest and a $40 million penalty.

“If you insist on proceeding to litigation, I assure you that Mr. Musk will be seeking discovery into every other Section 13(d) matter investigated, recommended, filed, and resolved by the Commission over the last three years, which will prove the arbitrary and capricious nature of the staff’s recommendation here,” Spiro wrote.

Former SEC Prosecutor David Chase, who is not involved in the case, said $263 million for a disclosure violation, a 13(d), is “extraordinarily high”.

“I don’t care if they are charging Elon Musk or Santa Claus that is an extraordinary amount.”

Chase pointed out that the SEC on Sept. 25 settled charges against 25 entities and individuals for similar violations including Alphabet and Goldman totaling $3.8 million.

However, he did acknowledge that the $263 million penalty would be consistent if there was a fraud component to the case.

Musk, who has become part of President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle, will likely ask incoming SEC chair Paul Atkins to withdraw the case.

With Post wires

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