Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images In a lawsuit filed late Friday, shareholders suing Tesla and CEO Elon Musk for alleged securities fraud said they had won part of a crucial decision in their class action lawsuit. Shareholders are suing Tesla for money they lost after Musk wrote on Twitter in 2018 that he was considering taking over his electric vehicle company for $ 420 a share and said he had secured funding to do so. The trading of Tesla shares initially stopped, then the shares were extremely volatile for weeks after the tweets. Musk later said he was in talks with Saudi Arabia’s state investment fund and felt confident the funding would be offered at his proposed price. An agreement was never implemented. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated and accused Musk of securities fraud as a result of these tweets. Tesla and Musk entered into a revised settlement agreement in 2019 for these categories, but Musk is trying to terminate this agreement now. Losses from shareholder litigation could amount to the billions of dollars that Musk and Tesla owed to members of the class. The shareholders’ lawyers said in a statement on Friday that Judge Edward M. Chen, who is presiding over the matter, concluded that Musk had acted with a scientist – in other words, that he had knowingly made false statements that funding had been secured. when he wrote on Twitter. This information was revealed at the request of the shareholders’ lawyers for a temporary restraining order against Musk to prevent him from making further public remarks on aspects of this case, as he did during his widespread appearance at the TED 2022 conference on April 14. . The request for a temporary restraining order refers to an earlier ruling by Judge Chen, which is currently sealed because it refers to information that Musk’s team considered confidential. “We expect the order to be published soon,” Adam Apton of Levi & Korsinsky, chief consultant to Tesla, told CNBC via email. At TED on Thursday, Musk called the financial regulators at the SEC San Francisco office “bastards.” Musk also said: “The SEC was aware that the financing was secured, but it continued an active, public inquiry at the time. Tesla was in a precarious financial situation. And the banks told me that if I did not agree to “I would arrange for the SEC to do so, the banks would stop providing working capital and Tesla would go bankrupt immediately. It’s like having a gun in your child’s head. I had to give it to the SEC illegally.” It is not clear why Musk felt he may not have been able to raise working capital for Tesla, but he was confident he could raise the billions needed to privatize the company at the same time. Musk is currently the richest man in the world on paper and is trying to acquire Twitter, the social networking platform of his choice, and make it private for about $ 43 billion. Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, an associate at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said in an email to CNBC: “Nothing will ever change the truth, which is that Elon Musk was considering taking over Tesla and could have – what is left about half a decade later. they are the random lawyers of the plaintiffs who try to make money and others try to prevent this truth from coming to light, all to the detriment of freedom of speech. ” The same statement was made by Spiro in Bloomberg, who spoke first about new developments in shareholder litigation. The trial is currently set for May 31, 2022, in federal court in San Francisco, but that could change. Levi & Korsinsky’s Apton told CNBC, “We look forward to proving the remainder of our case in court and recovering compensation from the class.”
