Musk seeks appeal against judge ruling that his tweets were false

Elon Musk is trying to appeal against a judge’s finding that the 2018 tweet about Tesla privatization was false, according to Bloomberg.

Musk, and others accused in a shareholder lawsuit for the tweet, have asked U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen in San Francisco to certify the decision so that an appeal can be made. Preliminary rulings can generally not be challenged on appeal.

Shareholders claim that Musk’s “unequivocally false” tweet in August 2018 and subsequent Twitter posts cost them billions of dollars amid wild fluctuations in Tesla’s share price. The trial is set to begin in January. Chen ruled on April 1 that jurors could not rule out that Musk’s tweet was not misleading.

But in a court hearing Friday, Musk’s lawyers argued that the judge “analyzed the individual phrases in the various tweets and suggested that some other information should accompany the tweets, although the short Twitter medium limits the number of characters per tweet.” “.

The court must take into account that the statements were made on social media and not in a regulatory statement, when analyzing whether a statement is misleading, the lawyers wrote.

“The defendants are not seeking an interim appeal for reasons of delay – on the contrary, the defendants are not seeking a postponement of the scheduled January 2023 trial and are planning to make a speedy decision by the Ninth Circuit before the trial,” the lawyers wrote in the statement.