Elon Musk’s lawyer is accusing a San Francisco federal jury of “mocking” the billionaire by including “$4.20” among the figures for recommended damages in a class-action suit that accused the tech titan of misleading Twitter investors.
In a Thursday letter to US District Judge Charles Breyer, defense attorney Alex Spiro argued the verdict was “corrupted” by bias and denied his client a fair trial.
Spiro is seeking a probe into the matter — to be followed by a motion seeking a ruling in favor of Musk or a new trial.
The laywer cited a handwritten verdict form in which jurors listed “$4.20” for one damages entry — written in bright blue ink while the rest of the entries were black.
Spiro said the unusual entry was no accident, calling it a deliberate jab at Musk tied to his well-known association with the number 420.
“The inescapable conclusion,” the attorney wrote, “is that the jury felt it appropriate to use its verdict to send a message to Mr. Musk.”
He accused jurors of injecting “outside influence and noise” into what should have been a neutral deliberation.
The number 420 is widely recognized as slang for marijuana and has been part of a running joke by Musk.
In 2018, he tweeted he was considering taking Tesla private at “$420” — a post that triggered an SEC fraud case — and later set his Twitter buyout price at $54.20 per share, reinforcing the association.
The jury found last week that Musk defrauded investors by intentionally driving down Twitter’s stock price before he acquired it in 2022, later renaming it X.
Spiro argued in his letter filed Thursday that the jury wasn’t actually “deciding a securities fraud case” but sending Musk a message.
“The jury’s emphasis on the $4.20 number, which had no significance to its damages determination, but appears to be a mocking reference to a number previously associated with Mr. Musk, shows that the verdict was a mockery of justice: a commentary not on whether Mr. Musk committed securities fraud (he did not) but on the jury’s views about Mr. Musk himself,” Spiro wrote.
“No reasonable and experienced person could have any faith in the fairness of this proceeding or its resulting verdict,” he concluded.
Plaintiffs in the high-stakes case had alleged Musk made public statements about the prevalence of spam accounts and the status of the Twitter deal that depressed the company’s stock price, harming traders who sold shares or related options during the period.
The jury found Musk liable for some of the fraud claims — but rejected the main allegation, that he conducted a deliberate “scheme” to manipulate Twitter’s stock price.
In his Thursday letter, Spiro claimed Musk was deprived of his chosen counsel after plaintiffs’ lawyers indicated they intended to call Spiro himself as a witness — a move that would create a conflict under the advocate-witness rule.
The lawyer, of Manhattan-based powerhouse firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said he was forced to step back from a jury-facing role as a result. However, plaintiffs never called him to testify.
Spiro also took aim at the venue of the trial, arguing that seating an impartial jury in San Francisco was effectively impossible given widespread negative views of Musk there.
“I remained concerned that Mr. Musk would be unable to seat an impartial jury given his notoriety and reputation in the District,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
He pointed to comments from Judge Breyer during jury selection — including that “[m]aybe if I went in a different part of the country, I might get a different panel” — as evidence the jury pool was biased.
According to the filing, the court was forced to accept jurors with preexisting views because excluding all potentially biased candidates would have made it impractical to seat a panel.
Taken together, the arguments lay the groundwork for a formal motion seeking a new trial or mistrial — a move that could upend the verdict just days after it was reached.
In a notable aside, Spiro also referenced a separate legal battle in Delaware. He took a swipe at Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, the jurist who twice denied Musk a substantial payday from Tesla shareholders.
Spiro noted that McCormick had publicly reacted to a verdict in yet another case by endorsing a LinkedIn post celebrating an outcome against Musk.
Musk recently demanded McCormick recuse herself from the Delaware case, a class action lawsuit against Tesla.
McCormick responded that the apparent endorsement may have been accidental — or something else entirely.
“I either did not click the ‘support’ icon at all, or I did so accidentally,” she wrote, adding: “I do not believe that I did it accidentally.”
The Post has sought comment from the plaintiffs’ attorney in the San Francisco suit.
