Elon Musk wants to test the upcoming fraud with the shareholders of Tesla Inc. moved from San Francisco, saying jurors in that area will be biased against him because of recent layoffs at Twitter Inc. and “local negativity.”
The billionaire who runs Tesla and Twitter proposed the trial be held in west Texas, where Tesla moved its headquarters to Austin from northern California about a year ago, according to a lawyer’s filing on Friday.
A large part of the jury pool of the San Francisco area “is likely to retain a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of the recent layoffs at one of the companies as individual potential jurors – or their friends and relatives – may be personally affected,” wrote the lawyer. “Existing baseline biases have been amplified, amplified, and reinforced by the negative and inflammatory local publicity surrounding the event.”
Investors suing Tesla and Musk, the chief executive, said the August 2018 tweets about taking the electric car maker with “safe funds” were “undeniably false” and cost billions of dollars by spurring wild swings in Tesla’s stock price. Musk stated that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has agreed to support his efforts to take Tesla private. The trial is set to begin January 17.
“To be clear, this motion was not brought simply because Mr. Musk has been the subject of negative news coverage. Mr. Musk has been a public figure for more than a decade and acknowledges that being the subject of negative and even unfair media attention comes with the territory,” according to the filing. mentioned. “Local media and the political establishment have tried to portray Mr. Musk as personally responsible for causing material economic damage to a significant number of potential jurors affected by the dismissal and the City of San Francisco as a whole.”
Musk has sparred with Twitter’s hometown of San Francisco after he turned some space at the company’s Market Street headquarters into makeshift bedrooms, possibly in violation of the city’s building code. Musk also slammed Mayor London Breed over the city’s fentanyl crisis.
He bought Twitter for $44 billion at the end of October and became its chief executive. After Tesla’s corporate headquarters move to Austin in December 2021, the company still has a formidable presence in California. In a blog post this week, the company said it has 47,000 employees in the country.
Musk’s lawyers think west Texas will give them a fairer place than northern California.
“Mr. Musk would prefer to receive a fair trial in the Western District of Texas,” he said. “Mr. Musk has not been the subject of extensive, widespread, and inflammatory press coverage by the local media in the Western District of Texas, as he has been in this district. News outlets Texas published fewer stories about Mr. Musk.
Our new weekly Impact Report newsletter examines how ESG news and trends are shaping the roles and responsibilities of today’s executives. Subscribe here.