Next week in San Francisco, a trial is supposed to get underway to settle a dispute between Tesla shareholders and the company’s CEO, Elon Musk. But in a court filing submitted late Friday, Musk is trying to move the trial to Texas. He relocated Tesla to Austin two years ago. But he also says he can’t get a fair trial in San Francisco because there’s been too much negative media coverage of his acquisition of Twitter. And because he laid off so many Twitter employees, he argues the jury pool is tainted.
“It seems like it would cost … a lot of judicial resources to then move this to another judge who has to get up to speed on the idea that simply because there's been coverage, you couldn't get a fair jury,” says Loyola Law School Professor Jessica Levinson.
Late last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, which is a way to modify a weapon to simulate automatic fire, and a big part of why the 2017 attack on a Las Vegas music festival that killed 60 people is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.