The 420 and other fables: Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field now belongs to Elon Musk

On 7 August 2018, Elon Musk tweeted: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The 420 is a weed joke, considered to be the best time of the afternoon to light a joint, and a meme Musk had recently discovered.

The man who would later buy Twitter for $44bn and call himself “chief twit” later added: “Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it’s contingent on a shareholder vote.”

As expected, Tesla’s share price surged for three weeks, then crashed when the deal didn’t materialise.

The class action lawsuit that followed alleged that “Musk rounded the price up to $420 per share because he thought his girlfriend at the time, Claire Elise Boucher (also known as “Grimes”), would find it funny due to the significance of the number to marijuana users”.

Amazingly for Musk, the presiding judge had already found that the second tweet and Musk’s initial insistence about “funding secured” were false. And yet he won. 

Also amazingly, despite Judge Edward Chen telling the nine-person jury that Musk’s tweets were “untrue” and that he “acted with reckless disregard for whether the statements were true”, they found in his favour. 

In his April 2022 ruling, Chen found that “no reasonable jury could find the statement ‘funding secured’ accurate and not misleading”, as the “evidence shows that there was nothing concrete about funding coming from the PIF”. The Public Investment Fund is the Saudi Arabian government’s, well, investment fund.