A court spokesman said Friday that federal judge Edward Chen denied Musk’s request to move the case from San Francisco to the state of Texas, where Musk has since moved Tesla’s headquarters. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Tuesday.
In early August 2018, Musk stirred up a message on Twitter stating that he was considering pulling the electric car maker off the stock market and that its financing was “secured”. The unusual announcement caused unrest in the stock markets; Tesla shares rose almost eleven percent, after which the New York Stock Exchange temporarily suspended paper trading.
A few weeks later, Musk took a step back: he declared that staying in the stock market was the “better way for Tesla.” Musk has been sued for allegedly “artificially manipulating” the price of Tesla stock in an attempt to harm any investor who bet the share price would drop.
Musk’s lawyers had justified the call for the case to be moved to Texas because the public in San Francisco was against Musk over his acquisition of Twitter and the subsequent wave of online decommissioning. Local media have made “biased and negative posts” about Musk in recent months, and local politicians such as the mayor of San Francisco have taken a stand against the entrepreneur.
According to the Bloomberg news agency, Judge Chen disputed these allegations, saying Musk also had “many fans” in San Francisco. It is quite possible to form an impartial jury. In an earlier ruling, the federal judge had said that Musk’s tweet could be considered “false and misleading.”
Musk has already had a lot of trouble with the US authorities because of the tweet. The Securities and Exchange Commission mandated that Musk’s tweets directly related to Tesla be reviewed by a lawyer before they were published, forcing him to step down as Tesla’s chairman of the board in 2018. In addition, Musk and the electric car company each had to pay $20 million fines. Last spring, Musk unsuccessfully tried to overturn the SEC decision.
(SDA)