In a San Francisco courtroom, Elon Musk defended his conduct leading up to his 2022 purchase of Twitter as he faces a class-action lawsuit accusing him of misleading investors and costing them millions of dollars.
The case focuses on events before Musk completed the $44 billion acquisition of the social media company—later renamed X—in October 2022. Shareholders who sold Twitter stock between May 13 and October 4, 2022 claim Musk violated federal securities laws by making statements that pushed the company’s share price down while he was negotiating the deal.
A major point of dispute is Musk’s repeated claim that Twitter had far more fake or spam accounts than the roughly 5% reported in regulatory filings. Testifying for a second day, Musk insisted the true number was much higher, suggesting it could be around 20%.
Concerns about bots were already known before the deal. Twitter had disclosed its estimates to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for years and warned that the real figure could be higher. The company had also previously settled a $809.5 million case in 2021 over allegations that it overstated certain user metrics.
During testimony, Musk argued that saying the bot count was significantly higher was “like saying the grass is green or the sky is blue.” After Musk’s appearance, expert witnesses and former Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal testified.
Segal said Twitter never knowingly filed false reports about spam accounts and suggested the real figure might actually be closer to 1%. Musk, however, continued to argue that the company had misled the public about the scale of fake accounts.