According to documents filed by investors suing Elon Musk’s electric vehicle firm, a court judged a 2018 tweet in which Musk claimed to have secured money to take Tesla private to be “false and deceptive.”
Tesla shareholders have charged the company of securities fraud in the aftermath of the August 7, 2018 tweet, which caused the share price to swing dramatically for many days.
Plaintiffs requested the federal judge in charge of the lawsuit, Edward Chen, in a late Friday court filing to force Musk to stop publicly stating that he “secured” funds to take Tesla private at $420 per share, as he did again on Thursday.
Previously, the billionaire entrepreneur stated that he was in negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s national wealth fund at the time and that he was optimistic he would achieve an agreement. However, no agreement was ever made public.
According to the complaint, Chen recently decided in an unpublished decision that Musk’s assertions were “false and deceptive,” and were made “recklessly and with full knowing of the facts that he misrepresented in his tweets.”