Elon Musk defrauded Twitter Inc. investors when he disparaged the company in 2022 in an effort to buy the social media platform for a lower price than his original $44 billion bid, a jury concluded.

Jurors in federal court in San Francisco found Friday that Musk intentionally misled Twitter shareholders when he tweeted that the social network — now called X — had too many fake accounts and tried to back out of the deal.

The jury calculated how much Musk’s statements drove down the company’s stock price for each trading day over a period of about five months. The amount of damages he must pay to individual investors — which could total hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — will be determined at a later date.

The verdict marks a rare defeat in court for the world’s richest person, who has been dubbed “Teflon” Elon for his track record of winning high-stakes legal battles that many expected him to lose.

He prevailed in a 2023 trial over Tesla Inc. investors’ allegations that he misled them in a tweet five years earlier saying he had “funding secured” to take the electric car-maker private. Musk is a co-founder of Tesla and its chief executive officer.

But even a multibillion-dollar damages award wouldn’t dent Musk’s net worth, which was $661.1 billion on Friday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

(With assistance from Dana Hull.)

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