Trial in San Francisco
Elon Musk faces a billion-dollar fine
Updated March 22, 2026 – 4:29 amReading time: 2 minutes
A US federal court is dealing with Elon Musk’s takeover of the online service Twitter. The jury’s verdict is clear. For Musk’s lawyers it represents a “setback”.
According to a US jury, the tech multi-billionaire Elon Musk deceived the online service’s shareholders before his purchase of Twitter in 2022 in order to depress the company’s share price. The verdict, handed down Friday after a three-week trial in federal court in San Francisco, means the world’s richest man could be ordered to pay billions of dollars in damages. However, Musk wants to appeal the verdict.
The jury concluded that two tweets posted by Musk in May 2022 contained false statements. The online messages were therefore responsible for a collapse in Twitter prices. The ruling is a rare legal defeat for Musk. In the past, he had often emerged unscathed from legal disputes.
Musk’s lawyers described the verdict as a “setback.” However, they immediately announced that their client would appeal. Musk, head of the space company SpaceX and the electric car manufacturer Tesla, did not initially comment on the decision.
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Investor Giuseppe Pampena filed the lawsuit against Musk on behalf of shareholders who sold Twitter shares between mid-May and early October 2022. Musk bought the online platform at the end of October 2022 for $44 billion (38 billion euros in today’s money) and later renamed it X.
Ahead of the purchase, Musk claimed on Twitter that the acquisition agreement was temporarily suspended until Twitter could prove that the proportion of “bots” – fake accounts operated by software instead of real users – was as low as the platform stated. According to the plaintiffs, these statements were part of a scheme to pressure Twitter’s board of directors into accepting a price that was lower than the original offer.
