There is an Advantage to Being Hated

It appears that is almost impossible to seat a jury in Elon Musk's Twitter stock manipulation trial because everyone hates him so much.

I think that this will be a strategy used by Donald Trump's defense team when (if) he ends up in the dock.

Jury selection kicked off Thursday in San Francisco federal court in a trial centered on Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of Twitter in 2022.

Musk is set to stand trial in early March in a class action brought by Twitter investors who claim Musk manipulated Twitter stock leading up to his multibillion-dollar purchase of the social media platform.

Investors, including lead plaintiffs Steve Garrett, Nancy Price, John Garrett and Brian Belgrave, sued Musk in October 2022 over claims they suffered major losses when Musk deliberately made misleading statements about the presence of spam bot accounts on Twitter to drive down the company’s stock, in hopes of backing out of the acquisition deal or renegotiating more favorably for himself.

The investors claim that Musk attempted to artificially lower Twitter’s stock price after agreeing to acquire the platform, while also failing to disclose when his Twitter stake exceeded 5% or that he had initially been invited to join Twitter’s board.

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More than a third of the initial jury pool indicated they could not serve impartially and were dismissed by the judge. Others were questioned by the parties about the answers they provided to the court, indicating a strongly held negative opinion of Musk.

Stephen Broome of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, an attorney for Musk, raised concerns with Breyer following jury screening that the court was “desensitized” to how improper it would be to seat jurors who expressed extreme dislike for the defendant. He claimed that if Musk was any other defendant, a juror who said “I hate that guy and he has no moral compass” would be dismissed.

Breyer pushed back, saying that the case was not like any other because Musk is a well-known public figure akin to a United States president, and jurors are allowed to have personal views on public figures.

The judges is right.  It is ordinary when people of good will look at Elon Musk, and say, o quote the Dead Kennedys: