CEO Elon Musk appeals a decision about verdict on the twitter case

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk is appealing a judge’s decision that a tweet he made in 2018 about taking the company private was false.

As part of a shareholder lawsuit, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other defendants have asked a federal judge in San Francisco to certify the judge’s order so it can be appealed. Appeals from pre-trial orders are rare.

“Indisputable false” August 2018 tweet and subsequent Twitter posts by Tesla CEO Elon Musk have cost shareholders billions of dollars, they claim. It’s been set for January. Courts couldn’t agree on whether or not Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s April 1 tweet wasn’t deceptive.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s lawyers argued in court filings on Friday, saying that a judge “parsed individual phrases of the various tweets and indicated certain additional information should have accompanied the tweets, even though the short-form Twitter medium limits the number of characters per tweet.”

When determining whether a statement is misleading, the court must take into account the fact that the statements were made on social media and not in a regulatory filing, the lawyers wrote.

To the contrary, defendants are not asking for a stay of the scheduled January 2023 trial and anticipate proceeding swiftly to obtain resolution from the Ninth Circuit before trial, the lawyers wrote in the filing.

The case number is 18-cv-04865, filed in the Northern District of California’s (San Francisco) U.S. District Court.