The Man Who Forgot Everything: Inside the Musk Twitter Fraud Trial

On Tuesday afternoon in a San Francisco federal courtroom, Jared Birchall - the man who runs Elon Musk's family office, manages his personal fortune, and oversees his private financial empire - took the stand in a class-action investor fraud lawsuit and proceeded to forget almost everything.

Birchall gave the answer "I don't recall" to lead attorney Aaron Arnzen dozens of times. He could not recall meetings he attended about Twitter. He could not recall conversations with Musk about the acquisition. He could not recall emails he had written and sent regarding the deal.

Then came the moment that made the courtroom pause. Birchall said he did not recall that Jack Dorsey had been Twitter's chief executive.

Dorsey - who had led Twitter for seven years and was publicly known as one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable executives - had left the CEO role just months before Musk's takeover bid. Musk and Dorsey are close friends. The amnesia required to not recall this would be extraordinary for anyone. For the man coordinating Musk's $44 billion acquisition effort, it strains credulity entirely.

The Strategy on the Stand

The next day, Musk took the stand himself. What he said was considerably more damaging than his aide's convenient forgetting.

Arnzen pressed Musk on whether he had deployed a "rope-a-dope" strategy during the acquisition - a boxing metaphor for exhausting one's opponent before making a decisive move. The allegation from plaintiffs is that Musk rushed Twitter's board into accepting his offer, then publicly announced the deal was "on hold" and ultimately that he was "terminating" it - forcing individual investors to sell at depressed prices while he privately positioned himself to complete the acquisition at better terms.

"He may have."

Those are Musk's own words on the stand in response to the rope-a-dope question.

The lead plaintiff, Brian Belgrave, sold thousands of Twitter shares in July 2022 after Musk's public "termination" announcement. He sold below his purchase price, and significantly below the $54.20 per share Musk ultimately paid when Twitter sued him to force completion of the deal.

"I got screwed. I got cheated."

Those are Belgrave's words.

The Pattern

This is the first lawsuit over Musk's Twitter purchase to reach trial. It will not be the last time this sequence of events is examined. The core allegation is simple: Musk's public posts in the summer of 2022 - the "on hold" tweet, the termination announcement - moved markets. Retail investors acted on that public information and sold. Musk knew the deal was likely to proceed. He "may have" been using their exits to his advantage.

On the stand, Musk insisted his posts were "extremely literal" and that he was "simply speaking his mind." He offered a defense that might be described as the inverse of Birchall's amnesia - not that he forgot, but that his words meant exactly what they said and nothing more.

"What I think privately is what I say publicly, there's no difference," Musk said.

The jury will have to decide whether that is credible from a man who, in the same testimony, admitted he told Twitter's board he would "hunt them down for the rest of time" and who, when pressed on whether he had tried to mislead investors by falsely declaring a termination, offered that if this were a trial on "whether I've made stupid tweets, I'd say I'm guilty."

Who Is Jared Birchall

Birchall is not a peripheral figure. He is the operational core of Musk's personal financial world - the man between Musk and his money. He has appeared in prior reporting as the point person on Musk's covert stake-building in Twitter stock before the acquisition bid became public, a process that itself attracted SEC scrutiny over disclosure timing.

In March 2022, Musk began buying Twitter shares. Under SEC rules, an investor crossing the 5 percent ownership threshold must file a disclosure within ten days. Musk crossed that threshold and filed late - by eleven days - after acquiring over 9 percent of the company. The delayed disclosure allowed him to continue buying at lower prices. The SEC investigated. Musk paid no penalty.

Birchall coordinated that stake-building. He was, by his own admission on Tuesday, present at the relevant meetings and party to the relevant emails. He just couldn't recall any of it.

What the Trial Reveals

The case runs for three weeks. Investors are seeking unspecified monetary damages. The legal question is whether Musk's tweets constituted securities fraud - whether he knowingly made false or misleading public statements about a material transaction in order to benefit at the expense of retail shareholders.

The trial's early testimony has already produced two things of interest beyond the immediate legal stakes.

First: a sitting government figure - Musk currently holds an informal but powerful position coordinating federal spending cuts under the so-called DOGE initiative - has admitted in open court that he may have deliberately manipulated a public company's share price for personal financial advantage.

Second: the man closest to his finances, in charge of his family office and investment decisions, has demonstrated a remarkable inability to recall the basic facts of what was one of the most publicly documented corporate acquisitions in recent history.

Convenient forgetting is a defense strategy. It is also a pattern. The question is whether this jury will let it work.