On 20th March, a California jury mostly ruled in favour of Twitter shareholders who had alleged that billionaire Elon Musk had made false claims and had deliberately depressed the stock of the social media company in 2021 prior to his $44 billion takeover of the company. They, however, cleared Musk of allegations of being involved in a fraud to defraud investors.

Elon Musk expected to pay out billions as jury finds he misled Twitter investors in takeover (via @thejournal_ie) https://t.co/Phx2FyBwE6

— Winfried Eamon Scheidges (@celticarab) March 22, 2026

 
The choice concludes a civil class action suit against Musk by a consortium of Twitter stockholders in October of 2022, a few weeks prior to his acquiring control of the corporation. The trial took one week after another, with Musk being required to stand trial in a federal court in San Francisco to explain the controversial takeover.

In April 2022, Musk initially accepted an offer to acquire Twitter, now called X, and subsequently spent several months battling to terminate the acquisition before eventually finalising the acquisition.

During that interim, Musk tweeted and made public statements that led to his shareholders accusing him of purposely defrauding the stock price of Twitter. When the stock fell in reaction to the comments made by Musk, and the plaintiffs feared that it would never be purchased, they sold their stock, and then they ended up missing out on the deal after it was made.

The jury damages will result in estimates of approximately 2.5 billion dollars, based on the number of individuals who claim to become members of the plaintiffs and to have their damages awarded to them.

In a statement to CNN, Mark Molumphy, an attorney of the plaintiffs, said he was excited by the decision of the jury today, which he said was the biggest securities jury verdict in the history of the United States. The jury was sending a powerful message that there is no one who is above the law.

Musk intends to have the ruling overturned as lawyers representing the billionaire at the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan, LLP, pointed to other unrelated cases in Texas and Delaware where Musk has won an appeal recently.

“We perceive the current decision of the jury that judged both sides and did not find a case of fraud as a stumbling block on the way. And we are anticipating an appeal vindication,” attorneys of Quinn Emanuel said in a statement given to CNN by a spokesperson.

Musk had attempted to have the case dismissed by his legal team, which denied that the statements made by Musk were false and that the case filed by the plaintiffs had defects in trying to establish the connection between his statements and the losses suffered by shareholders. In the court, Musk stated that, should this have been a trial about whether or not he made stupid tweets, he would have said that he was guilty, per the New York Times, but he said that he did not think the posts would provoke anything of the so-called “material nature.”

The jury ruled that Musk was liable due to two tweets: one on May 13, 2022, that the Twitter deal was “temporarily suspended” as he sought information regarding the existence of bot accounts on the platform and the other on May 17 that the deal could not proceed until he obtained such information.

The class action led by the Twitter shareholders was not alone in its efforts to question the claims made by Musk on the acquisition.

In January 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk over allegedly neglecting the proper disclosure of the size of his ownership in Twitter, a move that enabled him to purchase the shares of the social media company at “artificially low prices.” The SEC estimated that Musk had not disclosed that he was in possession of over 5 per cent of the common stock of the company, which he had bought by mid-March 2022.

Last August, Musk sought to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the SEC, referring to the complaint as “constitutionally invalid.” Musk has previously said, according to his lawyer Alex Spiro, to CNN, that Musk had done nothing wrong and that the lawsuit was “an acknowledgment by the SEC that they could not bring an actual case.”