Elon Musk suffered a major setback after jury favored Twitter stakeholders in the lawsuit.
According to Sky News, a US jury has found Elon Musk misled investors by deliberately driving down Twitter's share price in the months leading up to his $44bn (£33bn) takeover of the social media company.
But the tech tycoon, and the world's richest person, was cleared of some fraud allegations in the civil trial in San Francisco.
The case centred on a class-action lawsuit, filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X.
Jurors were asked to decide if two tweets and comments Musk made on a podcast in May 2022 amounted to him intentionally defrauding Twitter shareholders, who sold their shares based on his statements.
It is not clear what amount in damages Musk will have to pay to thousands of shareholders, many of them institutional investors, but it is likely to be in the billions.
The court was shown a tweet in May 2022 where the tycoon said his takeover "cannot go forward" until Twitter's chief executive proved the bot percentage was less than 5%.
"He trashed the company. Trashed the executives. And tanked the stock," the shareholders' lawyer, Mark Molumphy, said during his closing argument on Tuesday.
Michael Lifrak, a lawyer for Musk, argued that the billionaire's concern about bots was real, and that speaking out about the problem did not show he committed or intended to commit fraud.
He used what he called Twitter's misrepresentation of the number of fake accounts on its service as a reason to retreat from the purchase.
Much of the case surrounded Musk's claim that the social media platform had underreported how many fake and spam accounts, known as bots, were on its platform.
The SapceX boss fortune is currently estimated at about $814bn (£610bn), much of it tied up in Tesla shares.
