The billionaire has just been acquitted by a San Francisco jury in a civil trial for his 2018 tweets in which he said he was going to take Tesla private and had raised funds for it.
What a difference a single decision can make.
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk is ready to give San Francisco, a city he was still violently critical of until recently, a second chance.
The mecca of technology, Musk said, was the stronghold of the awakening virus that had become his number one enemy.
For the serial entrepreneur, the “awake mind virus” is made up of new progressive ideologies often symbolized by the left of the Democratic Party. This is materialized through the promotion of ESG, and gender identity, or pronouns.
He believes that ESGs and pronouns are expressions of awakening that lead to nullifying culture, that is, to intolerance and the dictatorship of thought.
Attacks on San Francisco
ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance, while “pronouns” points to the gender identity debate. It means that people have to stop assuming that gender is binary and accept that everyone has the right to decide what they want to be called: he/his her/him, her/her/them/them/them.
San Francisco, as the flagship tech city of the progressive state of California, is therefore the center of this “awakened mind virus,” according to Musk. As a result, in late 2021, the billionaire notably moved Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas. He, too, left Silicon Valley and now lives near Austin.
But the tech mogul was recently forced to spend more time in San Francisco after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion. He has been spending a lot of time at the platform’s headquarters in the heart of the city. He was quick to attack the township which is held by the Democrats.
“So the city of SF attacks companies that provide beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl,” the billionaire posted on Dec. 6 with a link to an article about a parent. who revealed that her 10-month-old baby accidentally overdosed on fentanyl at a San Francisco playground. “Where are your priorities @LondonBreed!?”
Drugs are a silent epidemic in San Francisco. It is hidden in the alleys of the city center and in hotel rooms for the homeless. The city medical examiner’s report released in January 2021 found that in 2020 drugs killed three times as many people as the covid-19 pandemic. Most of the recorded overdoses were related to the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.
Musk’s attack came as the San Francisco City Council was investigating reports that the businessman had installed beds at Twitter’s headquarters for employees he had asked to work long hours. The billionaire, who had laid off more than 5,000 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, had decided to transform certain rooms into dystopian rooms.
‘The wisdom of the people’
His distrust of San Francisco had pushed him, in January, to request, through his lawyers, the transfer to Texas of his civil trial linked to 2018 tweets that was taking place in the technological city.
“For the past several months, the local media has saturated this district with negative and biased stories about Mr. Musk,” Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, wrote in a court filing, referring to the firings on Twitter.
“It is likely that a substantial portion of the juror pool…has a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of recent layoffs at one of his companies, as individual prospective jurors, or their friends and family, may have been personally impacted”.
The application was rejected and the trial was held well in the city. The verdict was handed down on February 3 and cleared Musk of fraud allegations made against him by certain investors in connection with the billionaire’s tweets in the summer of 2018 about Tesla, which was then on the brink of bankruptcy.
On August 7, 2018, Musk had written that he was considering taking Tesla off the stock market at a price of $420 per share. In particular, he said that he had secured the financing for such a transaction.
The tweets sent shares of the electric vehicle maker skyrocketing at the time, for a brief period. As a result, some Tesla investors said they lost millions.
However, a California court jury ruled unanimously on February 3 that Musk had not defrauded investors with his false claim.
Musk was quick to react, hailing the wisdom of the people.
“Thank God, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!” the billionaire tweeted. “I am deeply grateful for the unanimous jury finding of not guilty in the Tesla 420 private taking case.”
Will Twitter stay in San Francisco?
The tycoon’s post was commented on by many Twitter users who congratulated him on this victory. One of the comments then pointed out to him that California and San Francisco in particular were not completely lost as Musk had been suggesting for months.
“See? There’s still hope for San Francisco,” the user commented. “They remembered the communist school board, the communist district attorney, and now look: they are doing the right thing in their trial.”
The Twitter user urged Musk to “take back” the city.
“Take back San Francisco and the waking mind virus will be gone forever.”
“You’re right,” replied the billionaire.
The question now is what Musk intends to do. Will he, for example, leave Twitter headquarters in San Francisco or move it to another city as some of his fans suggest?
It is with this yardstick that we will see if the billionaire has given the mecca of technology a second chance.
