A Wednesday night court filing concerning a legal dispute stemming from a tweet sent by Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk in 2018 shows 3,350 eligible claimants will share in a $41.53 million payout.
Musk drew the SEC's attention in August 2018, tweet saying he was thinking about taking Tesla private and had "funding secured" with "investor support." When the plan fell through, shareholders blamed Musk's tweets for their losses. The SEC took legal action against Musk, claiming his tweets could be considered fraud.
A "fair fund" was created under a settlement. The fund was originally $40M, with Musk and Tesla each contributing $20M. It grew to $42.3M with interest payments.
Judge Lewis Liman, who's in charge of the case in Manhattan, mentioned on Thursday that he plans to give the green light to the payments around September 1st, or maybe even a little after that if there are no objections from anyone.
As part of the SEC settlement, there was also a consent decree. This meant that Musk had to step down from his position as the chairman of Tesla. Additionally, he agreed to a condition where a lawyer from Tesla would review and approve certain posts he made on Twitter.
Musk later bought Twitter, renaming it “X”, and sought to end the judgment, labeling it a "muzzle" on his free speech. However, a federal appeals court in May refused dismiss the order.
Musk is expected to appeal that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Shares of TSLA are down 1.97% in afternoon trading Thursday.