Elon Musk tried to dodge a $650,000 fine by claiming Twitter 'no longer exists'
Elon Musk has officially lost a lengthy legal battle involving his social media platform after a court upheld a huge fine linked to child safety concerns on the platform.
The case dates back to 2023 when the eSafety Commissioner, which is Australia’s online safety regulator, when social media app Twitter was asked to explain what steps it was taking to combat the spread of child exploitation material online.
Musk attempted to dodge the hefty $650,000 fine by claiming that Twitter no longer existed as it had since merged into X Corp, being renamed to X.
However, this excuse obviously didn’t fly Justice Michael Wheelahan and the court ordered the company to pay a fine of $650,000 AUD ($463,000).
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In addition, X was also ordered to pay up another $100,000 AUD ($71,200) towards legal costs.
Justice Wheelahan said: “A penalty near the maximum is appropriate in the case of the respondent, which is a substantial corporation so that it operates as a real deterrent and is not simply a cost of doing business.”
This isn’t the only legal case that Musk has lost recently as he also lost his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, earlier this week.
The billionaire had accused the AI company of breaking its founding agreement by restructuring it into a for-profit business.
The case included arguments over contracts, nonprofit obligations, company governance, and whether OpenAI violated its founding principles.
The AI company went on to publicly release emails and messages they said showed that Musk had once supported a for-profit direction.
In a unanimous verdict, the jury determined that Musk had waited too long to file his lawsuit, deciding that his claims had expired.
However, it’s not all bad news for Musk as the world’s richest man has also announced his plans for his space firm, SpaceX, to go public in the US.
This means that people will soon be able to trade the company’s shares in the stock market.
SpaceX is set to go public as soon as next month, with the firm itself being valued at a whopping $1.25 trillion.
If the listing goes ahead at that valuation, Musk’s majority stake in the business could be worth more than $600 billion alone, potentially pushing his total personal fortune past the $1 trillion mark.
A lot of SpaceX’s rapid growth has been driven by its satellite internet network Starlink, which has become one of the leading providers in the global space communications market.