Elon Musk urges judge to transfer shareholder lawsuit from San Francisco to Texas

Elon Musk has asked a federal judge to move a shareholder lawsuit trial out of San Francisco, claiming that unfavourable local media coverage has skewed potential jurors against him.

The Tesla billionaire wants the case to be heard in West Texas, which includes the state capital of Austin, where he relocated Tesla's headquarters in 2021. The case accuses him of causing volatility in Twitter's share price after he claimed he had enough financing to take the company private.

Judge Edward Chen declared Musk's tweets to be false and careless in a decision that was favourable to the shareholder's last spring.

Musk's August 7, 2018 tweet was "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured" 

If relocating the trial is not an option, Musk's attorneys want it postponed until the backlash against the billionaire's acquisition of Twitter has subsided.

“For the last several months, the local media have saturated this district with biased and negative stories about Mr. Musk,” attorney Alex Spiro wrote in a court filing Friday. 

Additionally, according to Musk's legal team, Twitter has fired about 1,000 people in the San Francisco area since he bought the business in late October.

“A substantial portion of the jury pool … is likely to hold 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 relatives – may have been personally impacted,” the filing said.

Musk has also been widely criticised for thousands of job cuts at Twitter and the handling of severance packages.