Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared in a San Francisco federal courtroom on Friday to defend tweets he posted to his tens of hundreds of thousands of followers in August 2018.

The tweets mentioned he had “funding secured” to take his electrical car firm personal for $420 per share, and that “investor assist” for such a deal was “confirmed.”

Tesla’s inventory buying and selling initially halted after the tweets, then shares had been extremely unstable for weeks. Musk later mentioned that he had been in discussions with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and felt certain that funding would come by means of at his proposed worth. A deal by no means materialized.

The SEC charged Musk and Tesla with civil securities fraud after the tweets. Musk and Tesla every paid $20 million fines to the company, and struck a revised settlement settlement that required Musk to briefly relinquish his function as chairman of the board at Tesla.

His 2018 tweets additionally triggered a shareholder class motion lawsuit from Tesla buyers. They alleged that Musk’s tweets misled them and mentioned counting on his statements to make trades price them important quantities of cash.

The shareholders’ trades in query passed off throughout a 10-day interval earlier than Musk appeared to confess a take-private deal was not going to occur in 2018.

Musk mentioned underneath oath on Friday that it is troublesome to hyperlink Tesla’s inventory worth to his tweets.

“There have been many circumstances the place I assumed that if I had been to tweet one thing, the inventory worth would go down,” Musk mentioned. “For instance, at one level I tweeted that I assumed that, in my view, the inventory worth was too excessive…and it went went greater, which was, which is, you understand, counterintuitive.”

It is uncommon for high executives at publicly traded corporations to debate their inventory worth as a result of any commentary can affect worth actions.

Daniel Taylor, director of the Wharton Forensics Analytics Lab and professor on the College of Pennsylvania, analyzed each commerce in Tesla inventory occurring on Aug. 7, 2018, the day that Musk tweeted. He calculated the whole buying and selling quantity each minute from the time the market opened by means of the time of Musk’s tweets a few buyout. 

Taylor discovered that the buying and selling quantity the minute Musk tweeted, at 12:48 p.m. ET that day, was over $350 million, and the buying and selling quantity for Tesla shares the following minute was over $250 million. By comparability, the common quantity 5 minutes earlier than Musk tweeted was $32 million per minute. The minute earlier than Musk tweeted, buying and selling quantity was $24 million.  

“It’s typically true that correlation will not be causation,” Taylor informed CNBC on Friday, after Musk’s first day on the witness stand. “Nevertheless, I’m unaware of any different rationalization for a 10-fold improve in buying and selling quantity the identical minute that Elon Musk tweeted.”

Musk additionally testified about his low opinion of quick sellers on Friday.

“I imagine quick promoting must be made unlawful,” Musk mentioned, referring to quick sellers as “dangerous individuals on Wall Avenue” who “steal” from different buyers. He mentioned in addition they plant tales within the media to “get the inventory to go down” and can “do something of their energy to make an organization die.”

Tesla was among the many most closely shorted shares in August 2018, when Musk made the statements about taking Tesla personal. Tesla’s share worth surged about 10% throughout buying and selling that day. Brief sellers face huge losses when shares in a given firm climb greater.

A few of the plaintiffs within the trial that is underway declare that Musk’s “funding secured” tweets had been meant to place upward worth strain on Tesla’s inventory driving a so-called “quick squeeze.”

Musk’s testimony will not be but full and the courtroom plans to listen to from him once more on Monday.

WATCH: Musk testifies over tweets