A San Francisco jury found Elon Musk liable Friday for intentionally misleading Twitter investors during the chaotic months of his 2022 acquisition of the social media platform, delivering a unanimous verdict that could cost the world’s richest man hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and represents one of the most significant legal defeats of his career.

The jury deliberated for two days before concluding that Musk’s public statements about Twitter’s bot problem and his wavering commitment to the $44 billion deal had artificially suppressed the company’s share price by between $3 and $8 per share between May and October 2022. Every investor who bought or sold Twitter shares during that window is entitled to damages — a class that could produce a total payout running into the hundreds of millions depending on the volume of trades affected.

The verdict lands despite Musk’s insistence throughout the trial that he had done nothing wrong. Testifying earlier this month, he argued that investors had simply read too much into his tweets and public comments, and that his stated concerns about fake accounts on the platform were genuine rather than strategic. The jury rejected that account entirely, finding that his claims were not merely careless or misconstrued but intentionally misleading.

“If this was a trial on whether I’ve made stupid tweets, I’d say I’m guilty,” Musk conceded during testimony — a line that acknowledged form while disputing substance. The jury found the substance damaging too.

The lead plaintiff, Brian Belgrave, a small-business owner from Oregon, told the jury he had sold thousands of Twitter shares in July 2022 after concluding from Musk’s public statements that the deal was dead. He sold at a loss relative to his purchase price, and at a price significantly below the $54.20 per share Musk ultimately paid when he completed the acquisition in October of that year, after Twitter sued him in Delaware to force him to honour the agreement.

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“I got screwed,” Belgrave said. “I got cheated.”

The sequence of events the jury evaluated began in May 2022, when Musk started posting about Twitter’s purported bot problem and announced the deal was “on hold.” He subsequently said he wanted out entirely. Twitter went to court to compel him to close. Days before that Delaware case was scheduled for trial — a proceeding legal analysts widely expected to go against Musk — he reversed course and agreed to pay the original price. The platform was subsequently renamed X.

For investors like Belgrave who traded during those months, the reversal came too late. They had already bought and sold based on what Musk was saying publicly, and what he was saying publicly, the jury found, was deliberately designed to mislead.

The verdict is not Musk’s first encounter with legal consequences for his social media posts. Tesla shareholders sued him in 2023 over tweets about the car company, a case he won. Friday’s outcome is different in both its unanimity and its finding of intent — the jury did not merely conclude that Musk’s statements moved markets, but that he knew they would and made them anyway.

Monte Mann, a trial attorney at Armstrong Teasdale who focuses on business litigation, said the verdict carried implications beyond the specific damages owed to Twitter investors. “If you move the market with your words, you own the consequences,” Mann said.

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Musk’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment Friday. Nor did lawyers for the investor class. The damages phase of the proceedings will determine the precise financial exposure Musk faces, with the per-share range established by the jury providing the framework for calculating individual and aggregate awards across the class.

Musk’s courtroom demeanour during testimony had done little to soften the jury’s view. He grew combative with opposing counsel, repeatedly refusing to answer questions with a simple yes or no and accusing the investors’ lawyers of trying to mislead the very jury that was evaluating his own alleged misleading. The performance was consistent with his public persona but ill-suited to the specific demands of a civil fraud trial, where credibility with twelve ordinary jurors matters more than dominance of a social media exchange.

The verdict will be appealed. Musk has the resources for a prolonged legal battle, and the damages calculation will itself be contested before any money changes hands. But the jury’s finding — unanimous, after two days of careful deliberation — that one of the world’s most powerful individuals deliberately manipulated the market in a company he was in the process of buying is not a finding that litigation can fully erase, whatever the appellate courts eventually decide.