Elon Musk has urged a federal judge to shift a trial in a Tesla shareholder lawsuit out of San Francisco because he says negative local media coverage has biased potential jurors against him. Instead, in a filing submitted late Friday—less than two weeks before the trial was set to begin on Jan. 17—Musk's lawyers argue it should be moved to the federal court in the western district of Texas, per the AP. That district includes the state capital of Austin, which is where Musk relocated his electric car company, Tesla, in late 2021.
The shareholder lawsuit stems from Musk's tweets in August 2018 when he said he had sufficient financing to take Tesla private at $420 a share—an announcement that caused heavy volatility in Tesla's share price. In a victory for the shareholders last spring, Judge Edward Chen ruled that Musk’s tweets were false and reckless. If moving the trial isn’t possible, Musk’s lawyers want it postponed until negative publicity regarding the billionaire’s purchase of Twitter has died down.
“For the last several months, the local media have saturated this district with biased and negative stories about Mr. Musk,” attorney Alex Spiro wrote in a court filing. The filing also notes that Twitter has laid off about 1,000 residents in the San Francisco area since he purchased the company in late October. “A substantial portion of the jury pool ... is likely to hold a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of recent layoffs at one of his companies as individual prospective jurors—or their friends and relatives—may have been personally impacted,” the filing said.
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