Courts

Elon Musk's Faith In The People Of Twitter May Cost Him A Lot Of Money

He left the Wario costume home this time.

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TIME Person of the Year Elon Musk

(Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for TIME)

King Twit has started to sing in his defense. As mentioned earlier, Elon is currently being charged with securities fraud involving a tweet he made back in 2018 suggesting he amassed enough money to take Tesla private. From Reuters:

Elon Musk, Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) chief executive, testified on Friday that investors do not always react to his Twitter messages as he expects, defending himself in a fraud trial over his 2018 tweet that he had funding to take the electric carmaker private.

Musk’s testimony began with questions about his use of Twitter, the social media platform he bought in October. “Just because I tweet something does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly,” Musk told the jury in San Francisco federal court.

A phenomenal lesson from The Onion’s brief on the significance of parody is that reasonable people… you know… get it. Reasonable people have the faculties to detect absurdity, there is the expectation that they will make a good faith effort to inform themselves and will not blindly fall subject to ideology. Now, I don’t know how often you’ve interacted with the general public at large, but reasonable people are actually few and far between. They’d get mad at water if you had a good enough PR team. No really, that actually happened — remember that time radio hosts got in legal trouble for a successful April Fool’s prank? Gullibility of the average person in mind, I find it hard to believe that Musk really thought him saying that “funding was secured” wouldn’t be taken at face value.

This declaration stands in stark contrast to many people who consider blind support a defining trait of Musk fanboys. Here are just a few examples:

And before you say that these are off-color fallacious accusations of phallacious idolatry, need I remind you of the one time that so many fanboys offered to throat Elon’s Musk that he then tried to delete the paper trail?

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Despite Elon’s tweet deletion, the especially heinous levels of thirst that were displayed after the billionaire playboy waxed horny on main has led to some brilliant copypasta:

The thing about copypasta is that it a genre of meme where someone says something so absurd that it spawns variations on the text that draw absurdity to the original. The above is not one of the permutations that cranked up the ridiculousness. This is the original text.

I think my point is made — there is a sizeable set of people that hang onto this man’s every word, are foaming at the mouth, and willing to foam at the mouth, to prove it. Even this man’s public failures have become a rallying point.

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Given that a judge in a prior case has ruled that Musk’s 2018 tweet was untruthful and reckless, I think that Elon and his hardcore legal team are going to have a hell of a battle convincing the jury that he shouldn’t have to pay out the wazoo. And as much sense as it makes to cast the average Musk Twitter follower as a reasonable person whose common sense and good judgment could not be swayed by what appears to be a very clear and unambiguous statement about a funding goal being reached, I do not have high hopes for them convincing the jury that the people on the blue bird app are capable of such discernment.

Musk To Jury: Just Because I Tweet Something, Doesn’t Mean People Believe It [Reuters]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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