“He knew what he was doing,” Molumphy said. The plaintiffs argue that, as Tesla’s stock price declined and buying Twitter became too expensive for Musk, he tweeted statements that drove down the stock price in the hopes he could renegotiate the deal for a lower price or get out of it altogether. Musk’s tweets, the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued, were not some “innocent mistake” or a “stupid tweet” off the top of his head, but carefully calculated to drive down’s Twitter’s stock price. Michael Lifrak, a lawyer for Musk, however, countered that the plaintiffs did not present “one shred of evidence” to show that Musk purposely plotted to drive down Twitter’s stock price. He reminded the jury that according to their instructions, even motive and intent to commit fraud is not enough to prove that actual fraud has taken place. Plaintiffs argued Musk’s tweets drove down the stock price in the hopes he could renegotiate the deal for a lower price or get out of it altogether. Getty Images Lifrak also said there’s “zero evidence” that Tesla’s stock price decline during the time he was in the process of buying Twitter was the issue. Everyone “wants to pay less and not more,” he said, adding that “you can’t just say” he wanted a lower price and therefore he committed fraud. The problem of bots and fake accounts on Twitter wasn’t new at the time Musk negotiated the deal. The company had paid $809.5 million in 2021 to settle claims it was overstating its growth rate and monthly user figures. Twitter also disclosed its bot estimates to the Securities and Exchange Commission for years while also cautioning that its estimate might be too low. But Musk claimed the number was much higher, at least 20% according to some analysts. Saying the bot number was at least this high was like “saying the grass is green or the sky is blue,” Musk said. Michael Lifrak, a lawyer for Musk, however, said the plaintiffs did not present “one shred of evidence” to show that Musk purposely plotted to drive down Twitter’s stock price. AP Twitter’s former CFO Ned Segal disputed this claim and said on the witness stand that the number was actually closer to 1%. Asked if Twitter ever filed false filings to the SEC that misstated its spam numbers, Segal said it did not. But he mentioned that the company once restated its finances after it became aware of a mistake in its calculation of daily users. In 2017, Twitter said it had been overstating its monthly user numbers by mistake because it was including users of a third-party app it should not have. Molumphy showed jurors tweets Musk sent before he agreed to buy Twitter, including ones from 2020 complaining about the number of fake accounts on the platform. He also referred to Musk’s testimony from last week, where, when he was asked whether he thought Twitter was “exaggerating” their user numbers before signing the deal, Musk replied, “Yes.”