Tesla CEO Elon Musk is attempting to overturn a judge’s decision that his 2018 tweet on taking the company private was misleading.
Musk and other defendants in a shareholder lawsuit over the tweet have requested San Francisco US District Judge Edward M. Chen to certify the ruling so that it may be challenged. Pretrial orders are often not appealable.
Musk’s “indisputably false” August 2018 remark and follow-up tweets on Twitter, according to the shareholders, lost them billions of dollars throughout Tesla’s stock price fluctuations. A trial date has been set for January.
On April 1, Chen concluded that no jury could determine Musk’s tweet was not deceptive.
Musk’s attorneys, however, contended in a court statement on Friday that the judge “parsed the individual terms of the numerous tweets and stated specific further information should have accompanied the tweets, notwithstanding the short-form Twitter medium’s character restriction.”
When determining whether a statement is deceptive, the court must take into account that it was made on social media rather than in a regulatory file, the attorneys stated.
“Defendants do not seek an interlocutory appeal for the purpose of delaying the scheduled January 2023 trial; on the contrary, defendants do not seek a stay of the scheduled January 2023 trial, and anticipate proceeding quickly to obtain resolution from the Ninth Circuit before trial,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.
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