SAN FRANCISCO—A U.S. judge has determined that Elon Musk’s 2018 tweets that funding had been secured to take electric car maker Tesla private was inaccurate and reckless, saying “there was nothing concrete” about financing from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund at that time.
San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s pre-trial decision represented a major victory for investors in a lawsuit accusing the world’s richest person of inflating stock prices by making false and misleading statements, causing billions of dollars in damages.
Chen granted the shareholders summary judgment on the issue of whether Musk knowingly made false statements but declined to grant them summary judgment on the question of whether these statements actually impacted Tesla’s share prices.
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