Elon Musk rebuffed in bid to move Tesla tweet trial to Texas

Source: Associated Press

Elon Musk rebuffed in bid to move Tesla tweet trial to Texas

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
January 13, 2023

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge on Friday rejected Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s bid to move or delay a trial over a misleading tweet about a potential buyout of the electric automaker, setting the stage for the mercurial billionaire to be thrust into a legal drama amid the turmoil of his Twitter takeover.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Edward Chen came during a hearing held in San Francisco federal court to go over the final details of a trial scheduled to begin Tuesday with jury selection.

Musk’s attorneys last week asked Chen to transfer the trial to a federal court in Texas, where Tesla moves its headquarters in 2021, arguing that negative coverage of Musk since his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October had poisoned the jury pool in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But Chen brushed aside those concerns Friday, and expressed confidence that a panel of impartial jurors could be drawn from a region populated by millions of people. He also noted that a jury was pulled together for trial in the highly publicized criminal trial of former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, whose transformation from a Silicon Valley star to accused swindler was the subject of an HBO documentary and book before those proceedings began in nearby San Jose, California.

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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-legal-proceedings-san-francisco-39e4cab7e93ad6befa4e31301b0955ce