Elon Musk may be someone who can't stop tweeting.
The Tesla and Twitter CEO recently admitted that he may have ignored pleas to stop tweeting during the securities fraud trial that aims to investigate if Musk is responsible for Tesla losing millions of dollars in investor money while taking the company private.
Elon Musk made the tweets in question in 2018, when he reportedly secured the funding he needed to turn Tesla into a private company.
Elon Musk 2018 Tweets Details
Elon Musk stated during his time at the stand that he supposedly continued to tweet about his attempt to take Tesla private despite the many pleas urging him to stop doing so.
According to a report from The Verge, lawyers for the plaintiffs peppered him with questions about the tweets he made at the time, with them working their way to his "funding secured" tweet from 2018 that became the main reason for his case.
The trial is meant to determine whether the tweets Musk posted in 2018 about Taking Tesla private damaged the company's shareholders during a 10-day period leading up to Musk backing out of his plan to take the company private, per the South China Morning Post.
The people who made the pleas to Musk to make him stop tweeting were Tesla's former board director Antonio Gracias and Tesla investors Ron Baron and Sam Teller, Musk's former de facto chief of staff, and other close associates.
Read More: Researchers Study Generating Sustainable Electricity From Snow In Japan
However, the damage was already done. By the time Musk tweeted his "funding secure" post, Tesla's stock trading halted after the tweets, which then became volatile for weeks, per CNBC. Musk later said he was in discussions with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund and felt sure the funding would come through.
Unfortunately, a deal never materialized, costing the Tesla investors that
believed Musk's buyout would pull through to lose money.
According to the Los Angeles Times, this period of volatility caused Tesla's market value to increase and decrease by $14 billion.
As such, Tesla investors are working to portray Musk as a "reckless tweeter" who disregards good advice about the impact his public statements can have on Tesla's stock price and shareholders.
However, Musk argued that it's difficult to link Tesla's stock price to his tweets, with him talking about one case wherein he tweeted his complaint about Tesla's stock being too high, only for it to go higher after the fact.
Is Musk In The Wrong?
Guhan Subramanian, a Harvard business professor that the plaintiffs called as an expert witness, found Musk's actions at the time an example of "egregious corporate governance," per the LA Times.
Subramanian added that Musk's proposal "an extreme outlier regardless of it's real or not. He said that a CEO almost never announces a deal publicly until a long process involving a special committe of a board of directors is complete.
He also mentioned that the board should be the one handling the buyout and not a company's CEO.
However, Tesla's board is also to blame for not setting up measures that would protect the company from the repercussions of its CEO's tweets.
Related Article: Elon Musk Fortune Shrinks by $182 Billion, Breaks Guinness World Record
