Elon Musk Moves For Twitter Fraud Mistrial Because He’s Too Hated

Nearly 40 prospective jurors were dismissed during jury selection in San Francisco because they could not set aside their biases against Elon Musk. That striking number is at the center of Musk's legal team's motion for a mistrial in the ongoing Twitter securities fraud class action lawsuit—a move that signals the defense believes the trial is not going its way.

The case stems from shareholders accusing Musk of deliberately tanking Twitter's stock price through misleading tweets about bot accounts before completing the $44 billion acquisition in 2022. Musk's legal team, led by Alex Spiro, filed a 20-page motion on March 7 explicitly citing "the animosity in the community toward Mr. Musk" as a core problem. The motion does not seek to dismiss the case outright—it asks the court to throw out the current trial and start over with a new jury.

The Five Grounds for Mistrial

Musk's lawyers list five separate reasons for declaring a mistrial. First, they argue that plaintiff's lawyers repeatedly violated the judge's own pretrial ruling. Judge Charles Breyer had explicitly barred any argument suggesting Musk violated securities laws when he secretly accumulated over nine percent of Twitter stock before disclosing his position to the SEC in early 2022. The defense claims plaintiffs ignored this restriction.