Jury clears Tesla’s Musk in lawsuit by investors

SAN FRANCISO — A jury on Friday decided Elon Musk didn’t deceive investors with his 2018 tweets about electric automaker Tesla.

The verdict by the nine jurors was reached after less than two hours of deliberation following a three-week trial and represents a major vindication for Musk.

The trial pitted Tesla investors represented in a class-action lawsuit against Musk, who is CEO of both the electric automaker and the Twitter service he bought for $44 billion a few months ago.

In 2018, Musk tweeted that he had the financing to take Tesla private even though it turned out he hadn’t gotten an ironclad commitment for an aborted deal that would have cost $20 billion to $70 billion to pull off.

Musk’s integrity was at stake at the trial as well as part of a fortune that has established him as one of the world’s richest people. He could have been saddled with a bill for billions of dollars in damages had the jury found him liable for the 2018 tweets that had already been deemed falsehoods by the judge presiding over the trial.

Musk was both vilified as a rich narcissist whose reckless behavior risks “anarchy” and hailed as a visionary looking out for the “little guy” in the trial’s closing arguments.

The trial hinged on whether Musk’s tweeting in 2018 misled shareholders, steering them in a direction they said cost them billions of dollars. The civil case centered on two tweets Musk posted Aug. 7, 2018, about a Tesla buyout that never happened.

Tesla’s stock surged during a 10-day period before falling back after Musk abandoned a deal in which he never had a firm financing commitment, based on evidence presented during the three-week trial.