The company’s lawyers electric vehicles Tesla and its executive director, Elon Muskasked a federal judge to move or delay a trial from the state of California to that of Texas alleging that impartial jurors will not be able to be found due to the “local negativity” that there is in that state towards Musk.
Musk and several Tesla board members will face a popular jury this year in a shareholder class action claiming the CEO manipulated Tesla’s stock in 2018 when he tweeted that he was considering taking his electric vehicle company private.
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Then, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) affirmed that the information disseminated in the tweet was “false and misleading”, fined Musk and Tesla with 20 million dollars and, in addition, forced Musk to leave the presidency of Tesla for three years.
In the next trial this year it will be determined if those Musk tweets affected the share price of Tesla and how they did it, and whether the company or its directors should be held liable and pay damages.
In a motion to transfer the site filed this week, lawyers representing the company and the mogul argue that Musk has been heavily criticized in California after buying Twitter in October of last year.
Following the purchase of the social network, Musk named himself CEO of Twitter and carried out massive layoffs at the California-based company.
“Local negativity towards Musk is not limited to the press. There are regular protests and pickets in front of Musk’s offices in San Francisco, ”the lawyers detail in the document presented this Friday.
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Last December Musk was booed after the comedian dave chappelle invited him up on stage at one of his performances at San Francisco (California).
In 2018 Musk resided in California and Tesla was headquartered in the Californian city of Palo Alto.
However, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX moved to Texas in 2020 and his electric vehicle company moved its headquarters to Austin (Texas) in 2021.
