Two tweets. That is what a nine-person jury in San Francisco federal court decided constituted securities fraud by the world’s richest man.

On Friday, the jury found Elon Musk liable for misleading Twitter shareholders during the chaotic months between his April 2022 agreement to buy the company for $44 billion and the deal’s October completion. The specific instruments of deception: a May 13, 2022 tweet claiming the acquisition was “temporarily on hold” over bot concerns, and a May 17 follow-up stating the deal could not proceed until he got more information on fake accounts. Twitter’s stock fell nearly 18% during that stretch. Investors who sold into the downturn — believing the deal might collapse — missed the eventual $54.20-per-share payout.

The Verdict’s Split Decision

The jury’s finding was precise in a way that matters for the appeal Musk’s lawyers have already telegraphed. Jurors unanimously agreed the two tweets were “materially false or misleading,” according to CNBC’s reporting from the courthouse. But they rejected the plaintiffs’ broader claim that Musk engaged in a deliberate scheme to defraud investors — a distinction his legal team at Quinn Emanuel seized on immediately.

“We view today’s verdict, where the jury found both for and against the plaintiffs and found no fraud scheme, as a bump in the road,” Musk’s attorneys said in a statement. “And we look forward to vindication on appeal.”

That framing understates the result. The jury awarded shareholders between roughly $3 and $8 per share per day in damages, which plaintiffs’ attorneys estimate will total between $2.1 billion and $2.6 billion depending on options calculations and claim submissions. If those numbers hold, plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Molumphy told CNN it would be “the largest securities jury verdict in United States history.”

A Pattern, Not an Aberration

This is not the first time Musk has faced legal consequences for treating public markets like a group chat. In 2018, he tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 per share — a claim the SEC called misleading and which Musk later had to defend in court by insisting the number was not, in fact, a marijuana joke. That episode ended in an SEC settlement requiring Tesla to pre-approve Musk’s material tweets, a condition that has been widely regarded as decorative.

Musk was acquitted by a jury in the Tesla case. This time, he was not.

And the SEC has not finished with the Twitter acquisition either. In January 2025, the commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose that he had accumulated more than 5% of Twitter’s stock by mid-March 2022 — a filing he was legally required to make within 10 days. The delayed disclosure, the SEC argued, allowed him to keep buying shares at “artificially low prices.” Musk has moved to dismiss that suit, calling it “constitutionally infirm.”

Taken together, the picture is of a serial offender in securities disclosure — someone who views the rules governing what public company stakeholders must tell the market as suggestions to be litigated after the fact rather than obligations to be met in real time.

What $2 Billion Means (and Doesn’t)

Bloomberg pegs Musk’s net worth at roughly $650 billion. A $2.6 billion damages award would represent about 0.4% of his fortune — the financial equivalent of a parking ticket. Plaintiffs’ attorney Joseph Cotchett framed the verdict differently: “This was not about Musk. It was about the whole operation,” he told CNBC. “People that have 401ks, kids, pension funds, teachers, firemen, nurses.”

The damages process itself will take months. Attorneys for the plaintiffs said claims administration will require about 90 days to establish, followed by several more months of processing before investors see any money.

The Precedent Question

The financial sting may be trivial for Musk personally, but the verdict creates case law. This is the first time a jury has held Musk liable for statements made on social media — a platform he now owns.

“Going forward, this will have a real chilling effect,” said Monte Mann, a Chicago-based business litigation partner, according to SFist. “Executives and dealmakers will need to think carefully about how public statements can be interpreted — not just as disclosure, but as part of the negotiation itself.”

Whether that chilling effect reaches Musk specifically is another question. The man who tweeted “funding secured” in 2018, settled with the SEC, and then spent the next eight years publicly mocking the agency is unlikely to experience a sudden conversion to disclosure discipline. The appeal will grind on. The tweets will continue.

But for the class of investors who sold Twitter stock at $33 while Musk publicly mused about walking away from a binding $54.20 agreement, Friday’s verdict offered something rarer than damages: a formal, unanimous finding that when the richest person on Earth told them the deal might be off, he was not telling the truth.

Sources