Elon Musk's Lawyer Struggles To Find Acceptable Jurors For Lawsuit Because 'So Many People...Hate Him So Much'

There are certainly some people who like the image of Elon Musk that they have in their heads, but no one actually likes Elon Musk as a person. The man is so unlikable, even Donald Trump got sick of him, and that man almost exclusively hangs out with the worst people in the world. Sadly, being a creepy, weird loser didn't stop Musk from becoming ludicrously wealthy, but it did cause a few problems for his lawyers in a recent lawsuit over Twitter's stock price, where Law360 reports they struggled to find acceptable jurors because there are "so many people who hate him so much."

That's not a quote written by the article's author, either. It would probably be a valid claim if it were, but no, that quote comes from Musk's lawyer himself. Yikes. Eventually, they did find the nine jurors they needed to begin the trial, but it doesn't sound like it was easy. Starting with a pool of 92 prospective jurors on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer quickly sent 38 of them home for saying they couldn't promise to be fair and impartial in a trial involving Musk. 

After excusing roughly 40% of the jury pool right out of the gate, Judge Breyer continued questioning potential jurors based on their responses to the court's questionnaire, asking many of them whether they felt like their "strong views" would prevent them from being fair and impartial. "It can't be based on your feelings about Mr. Musk, anything that you either like or dislike," Judge Breyer told the prospective jurors. 

As Law360 writes, one potential male juror told the judge he thought he could be fair but only because it's a civil suit and not a criminal one:

"I believe that in a criminal trial I would feel morally-obligated to convict, however, in a civil trial I could set those views aside," the man said, adding, "I believe it would be to the benefit of the human race for Mr. Musk to be sent to prison."

The stakes are lower in a civil case, the man said.

"I don't believe the loss of several hundreds of millions of dollars in civil trial will be even a drop in the bucket to his wealth," he said. "So it doesn't really matter."

The man did not make it onto the nine-member jury.

At one point, Judge Breyer reportedly told off one of Musk's lawyers for trying to strike a potential juror who had admitted to hearing claims that Musk was involved in "market manipulation" but said "he'd try" to be fair, noting that most of the people in the pool of potential jurors had claimed to have "a negative view" of Musk. Ultimately, though, Musk's lawyer was able to convince Judge Breyer to excuse the potential juror, along with a woman who told the court that Musk has "no moral compass" and "used his wealth to buy votes."

"I fear that what's happening here, is we have so many people [here] who hate him so much that we've become desensitized to how improper it would be to have somebody like this on the panel," Stephen Broome, one of Musk's lawyers, told the court.

As for the lawsuit itself, a group of former Twitter investors who are the plaintiffs in the case argue that back in 2022, after Musk initially promised to buy Twitter for $44 billion, he then "schemed" to get out of the deal by driving down the company's stock price with "material misstatements":

In 2023, Judge Breyer ruled that the investors had plausibly alleged Musk violated securities laws with a series of tweets that said the deal was "temporarily on hold" pending details about data regarding the number of alleged fake Twitter accounts but that he was "still committed to acquisition." Musk also stated that fake and spam accounts make up at least 20% of Twitter's users, but investors said the statement misled the investing public to believe that Musk had received bot user data from Twitter, when in fact he had not.

The case has been working its way through the court system for the last several years, but now that they have a jury, the trial can officially begin on March 2. Will Musk be found guilty of market manipulation? Will he be forced to pay up? That remains to be seen, but even though this case doesn't have much to do with cars specifically (unless you count the damage Musk did to Weird Car Twitter), we're definitely going to be keeping an eye on this one. 

At the very least, it should be entertaining, especially when you factor in the judge making a point at a pretrial hearing on Tuesday to ban any mentions of Musk's political beliefs outside of 2022 specifically. Fingers crossed things get spicy!