{"id":8983,"date":"2026-02-21T15:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/court-trouble-jury-hates-elon-musk\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T15:30:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T15:30:00","slug":"court-trouble-jury-hates-elon-musk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/court-trouble-jury-hates-elon-musk\/","title":{"rendered":"Court Having Trouble Assembling Jury for Elon Musk Because People Hate Him So Much"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Being one of the most despised men in America<\/a> does come with a few downsides, it turns out.<\/p>\n

As Elon Musk is set to stand trial in San Francisco\u2019s federal court for allegedly manipulating Twitter\u2019s stock, his legal team is discovering that it\u2019s pretty hard to find impartial jurors who don\u2019t \u201chate\u201d the billionaire\u2019s guts, according to new reporting<\/a> from Courthouse News<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The judge Charles R. Breyer had to carefully present the conundrum to the over 90 prospective jurors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever your opinion is on Mr. Musk, Twitter or Tesla, can you set it aside in the sense that you will judge the defendant based solely, emphasize solely, on the evidence produced in this trial and the law as I give it to you?\u201d judge Breyer asked the prospective jury pool, as quoted by the outlet.<\/em><\/p>\n

A particular lightning rod was Musk\u2019s close ties to the Trump administration. Musk donated nearly $300 million to Trump\u2019s presidential campaign<\/a>, and led the administration\u2019s effort to gut the federal government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency<\/a>, or DOGE, a pet project of Musk\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though you may have strong views on the presidency, this is not the forum where this is expressed,\u201d Breyer emphasized. \u201cWhatever your views of the presidency are, they are not going to influence your views in this case.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the reporting, over a third of the prospective jurors said they couldn\u2019t be impartial and were dismissed by the judge. Others that weren\u2019t dismissed but apparently insisted they could still be impartial admitted they had a strongly negative opinion of Musk, too.<\/p>\n

This sent Musk\u2019s legal team fuming. His attorney Stephen Broome considered it an outrage that the court was potentially allowing jurors through who held a low opinion of his client. If it was any other defendant and a juror said \u201cI hate that guy and he has no moral compass,\u201d Broome argued, that juror would be dismissed.<\/p>\n

Judge Breyer wasn\u2019t buying it. Jurors, he reminded Broome, are allowed to have personal opinions on public figures, which Musk very much is. \u201cHe is a public figure, and as a public figure, he will excite views, strong views,\u201d the judge said. \u201cThe question is whether or not they can set them aside.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trial, which is set to begin on March 2 and run through March 16, concerns accusations that Musk had manipulated the stock price of Twitter, later renamed X \u2014and now improbably folded into SpaceX<\/a> \u2014 while closing a $44 billion deal to buy the social media site. (That figure was widely seen as ludicrously overpriced; the company\u2019s revenue was only several billion dollars and it had in recent years been operating at a loss.)<\/p>\n

Musk did this, the plaintiffs argue, by deliberately making misleading statements about the platform.\u00a0In May 2022, Musk tweeted<\/a> to his hundreds of millions of followers that the deal was \u201con hold\u201d pending calculations that \u201cspam\/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 percent of users,\u201d suggesting that the percentage may actually be higher. Twitter\u2019s share tumbled nine percent the following day.<\/p>\n

If that could be interpreted as an honest slip-up, what came next was a brazen double down. A few days later, Musk claimed that bots and spam accounts made up an even larger 20 percent of Twitter\u2019s user base, and demanded that Twitter show proof that it was less than the initial five percent claim. Critics at the time saw this as Musk finding an excuse to back out of the questionable $44 billion deal he had already agreed to, or to crash Twitter\u2019s stock to close the deal at a lower price. Of the latter possibility, Musk said that at the time<\/a> that renegotiating the deal at a lower price wasn\u2019t \u201cout of the question.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trial will proceed with nine jurors and no alternates, according to Courthouse News<\/em>.<\/p>\n

More on Elon Musk:<\/strong> Elon Musk Is So Unlikable That His Feud With Random Airline Is Doing Wonders for Sales, Says CEO<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post Court Having Trouble Assembling Jury for Elon Musk Because People Hate Him So Much<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being one of the most despised men in America does come with a few downsides, it turns out. As Elon Musk is set to stand trial in San Francisco\u2019s federal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,178,3842,1521,5212,3936,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-elon-musk","category-future-society","category-space","category-spacex","category-the-industrialists","category-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}