Lawyers for the electric vehicle company Tesla and its executive director, Elon Muskasked a federal judge to move or delay a trial from the state of California to Texas claiming impartial jurors cannot be found due to the “local negativity” in that state towards Musk.
Musk and various members of the Tesla board will face a popular jury this year in a shareholder class action lawsuitwhich claims the CEO manipulated Tesla’s stock in 2018 when he tweeted that he was considering taking his electric vehicle company private.
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, it 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 stock price 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 venue filed this week, lawyers representing the company and the mogul argue that Musk has been highly criticized in california after having bought the social network Twitter in October last year for 44,000 million dollars. After the purchase of the social network, Musk appointed himself CEO of Twitter and exercised massive layoffs in the company based in California.
“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. Last December, Musk was booed after comedian Dave Chappelle invited him on stage at one of his performances in 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.