Last week, a jury in San Francisco concluded that Elon Musk had misled investors with his tweets that sent Twitter’s stock price down before his 2022 acquisition.
Now, Musk’s lawyers claim that he did not get a fair trial, and the evidence is an alleged 420 joke in the verdict.
“The jury revealed when completing its verdict that its decision to find liability in the first place was driven by a desire to send a message to Mr. Musk, rather than to faithfully apply the law,” Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro said in a letter sent to Judge Charles Breyer.
As part of the verdict, the jury provided handwritten estimates of how much artificial deflation per share the Twitter stock suffered in the weeks after Musk’s tweet. The numbers were all reportedly written with black ink, except for the $4.20 figure written in blue ink. The 420 figure is “a number previously associated with Mr. Musk,” Spiro claimed.
“The jury used its verdict to mock Mr. Musk and the process, making a numerical joke—coloring and emphasizing in bright blue the number $4.20 in its damages verdict—to send a message and signal to my client,” Spiro said.
Though it’s not explicitly stated in the letter, the lawyers might have viewed that “joke” as a reference to yet another infamous-tweet-debacle-to-legal-trouble pipeline that Musk found himself in a few years ago. In 2018, Musk claimed that he had enough funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share, sending the stock soaring before he backed away from the plan.
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018
The 420 number, a weed reference, has since been a staple in Musk’s trolling. In 2020, Musk mocked Tesla shortsellers with “short shorts” priced at $69.420 after the EV company surpassed Toyota as the world’s most valuable automaker and cut the price of its Model S sedan to $69,420. In 2022, he bought Twitter at a $54.20 per share offer price. Then, in 2025, Tesla launched its robotaxis in Austin, Texas, with a flat fee of $4.20.
Musk and Tesla eventually had to pay the SEC a combined $40 million fine for the Tesla tweet. In a separate lawsuit brought by Tesla investors, Musk said he rounded a $419 figure to 420 to amuse his girlfriend, and he was found not liable.
The March 2026 trial had a different ending, though. The jury found Musk liable to Twitter investors for his tweets but rejected a claim that he had schemed to defraud investors. The tweet in question had claimed that Musk’s deal to buy Twitter was on hold.
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
The damages are not yet determined, but Musk might have to pay billions of dollars.
Musk’s lawyer Spiro also claimed in his letter that he did not receive a fair trial because it was practically impossible to find enough people who didn’t hate him.
“Because so many jurors had antipathy toward Mr. Musk, the Court was unable to simply excuse those who expressed negative feelings towards him,” Spiro said. “Instead, it effectively imposed a higher bar to excuse jurors who had preexisting opinions and animosity toward Mr. Musk than it would for a typical defendant because the community’s negative feelings toward him were so pervasive.”
Even before the jury came to a decision, though, Musk’s lawyers had begun asking for a mistrial. Earlier this month, the billionaire’s lawyers alleged there was “cumulative prejudice” by the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the court, and had asked the trial to restart with a fresh jury.
