New court filings revealed that Tesla is currently fighting a $162 million lawsuit from JPMorgan over some expired warrants that the bank claims were affected by Elon Musk’s “funding secured” tweet in 2018.
Even three years later, Musk’s failed attempt to bring Tesla private that started with a tweet that announced that the funding for the transaction was “secured” is still haunting the company.
A new lawsuit has revealed that JPMorgan had warrants on Tesla back in 2018, and they adjusted the strike price of those warrants when Musk made those tweets.
They believe they were “contractually required” to do so as they see the tweets as “amounting to a significant corporate transaction.”
They wrote in the lawsuit filed Monday in Manhattan federal court:
“Even though JPMorgan’s adjustments were appropriate and contractually required, Tesla has refused to settle at the contractual strike price and pay in full what it owes to JPMorgan. Tesla is in flagrant breach of its contractual obligations. As a result, more than $162 million is immediately due and payable to JPMorgan by Tesla.”
Tesla has yet to respond to the lawsuit, but the bank did disclose that Tesla told them in 2019 that the price changes were “unreasonably swift and represented an opportunistic attempt to take advantage of changes in volatility in Tesla’s stock.”
It sounds like the bank and Tesla have been privately fighting over who has to flip the $162 million bill and now they are going to figure it out in court.
This is just the latest of a series of legal actions taken against Tesla and Musk over the latter’s brief effort to take the former private in 2018.
It’s worth noting that Musk was trying to take Tesla private at $420 a share pre-stock split.
It valued Tesla at around $70 billion at the time.
Today, just a few years later, Tesla’s stock trades at a valuation of over $1 trillion.
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