Musk combative witness in SolarCity lawsuit
WILMINGTON, Del. — Tesla founder Elon Musk took the witness stand Monday to defend his company’s 2016 acquisition of a troubled company called SolarCity against a lawsuit that claims he’s to blame for a deal that was rife with conflicts of interest and never delivered the profits he’d promised.
To the surprise of no one, the famously colorful billionaire did so in the most personally combative terms.
“I think you are a bad human being,” Musk told Randall Baron, a lawyer for shareholders who was pressing Musk to acknowledge his mistakes in helping engineer the acquisition of SolarCity, a manufacturer of solar panels.
“I have great respect for the court,” Musk later added, “but not for you, sir.”
The long-running shareholder lawsuit asserts that Musk, who was SolarCity’s largest stakeholder and its chairman, and other Tesla directors breached their fiduciary duties in bowing to Musk’s wishes and agreeing to buy the company. In what the plaintiffs call a clear conflict of interest, SolarCity had been founded by Musk and two of his cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive.
In the Delaware Court of Chancery on Monday, Baron sought to establish that Musk has sought to run Tesla without interference and therefore bears responsibility for any failures. The lawyer showed a video clip in which Musk said he liked running his own companies because he doesn’t want anyone to make him do what he doesn’t want to do.
But Musk insisted Monday that “I don’t want to be the boss of anything.”
“I prefer to spend my time on design and engineering,” he said.
Regarding Tesla’s all-stock acquisition of SolarCity, Musk asserted that he had nothing to gain financially from it because he owned shares of both companies.
Musk argued that SolarCity’s failure to meet aggressive sales forecasts and its loss of market share were only temporary. He said they reflected his decision to divert Tesla resources toward salvaging production of the Tesla Model 3 electric car — and then running “headlong into a pandemic.”