(33) Last week, a jury in San Francisco concluded that Elon Musk had misled investors with his tweets that sent Twitter’s stock price down before his 2022 acquisition. Now, Musk’s lawyers claim that he did not get a fair trial, and the evidence is an alleged 420 joke in the verdict. “The jury revealed when completing its verdict that its decision to find liability in the first place was driven by a desire to send a message to Mr. Musk, rather than to faithfully apply the law,” Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro said in a letter sent to Judge Charles Breyer. As part of the verdict, the jury provided handwritten estimates of how much artificial deflation per share the Twitter stock suffered in the weeks after Musk’s tweet. The numbers were all reportedly written with black ink, except for the $4.20 figure written in blue ink. The 420 figure is “a number previously associated with Mr. Musk,” Spiro claimed. “The jury used its verdict to mock Mr. Musk and the process, making a numerical joke—coloring and emphasizing in bright blue the number $4.20 in its damages verdict—to send a message and signal to my client,” Spiro said. Though it’s not explicitly stated in the letter, the lawyers might have viewed that “joke” as a reference to yet another infamous-tweet-debacle-to-legal-trouble pipeline that Musk found himself in a few years ago. In 2018, Musk claimed that he had enough funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share, sending the stock soaring before he backed away from the plan. Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.