A civil jury in California declared on Friday that Elon Musk deliberately misled Twitter investors when he sought to withdraw from his $44 billion acquisition of the platform in 2022.

At that moment, Musk had tweeted about Twitter having an excessive number of bots, which contributed to his later attempt to back out of the acquisition. (Twitter subsequently filed a lawsuit against Musk to compel him to complete the transaction.)

“Twitter deal temporarily paused awaiting details that substantiate the claim that spam/fake accounts indeed constitute less than 5% of users,” Musk wrote on the platform he has since rebranded as X.

In the days that followed Musk’s tweet, Twitter’s stock dropped by 8%. Investor Giuseppe Pampena filed a lawsuit against Musk representing other former Twitter investors who had sold shares between May 13 (the day of the tweet) and October 4, when the deal was completed.

Pampena’s lawsuit claimed that Musk intentionally expressed his worries about Twitter to create doubt regarding the platform’s stability, which would artificially lower its stock price, leading to losses for those who sold shares during that timeframe. Musk’s attorneys contended that he was voicing legitimate worries about the bot issue. However, the jury found the plaintiff’s argument more persuasive.

It remains uncertain how much Musk will owe these former Twitter shareholders, but Pampena’s lawyer indicated that damages could potentially reach $2.6 billion, as reported by CNBC. For Musk, this isn’t a significant setback, as Bloomberg approximates his net worth at over $660 billion.

This is not Musk’s first time facing legal issues over tweets. In 2018, he tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share, intending to buy out public shareholders and remove the company from stock exchanges. The SEC claimed these tweets were misleading, accusing Musk of securities fraud. Musk later had to testify in court that he was not joking about cannabis (420 being a commonly known reference to marijuana) and insisted he genuinely believed he would take Tesla private at $420 per share, which represented a significant premium on Tesla’s stock price at that time.

Musk won a similar lawsuit concerning the “funding secured” tweet, but this time, he will need to compensate.

Following the acquisition of Twitter, Musk renamed the company X, subsequently merging it with his new AI venture, xAI. The newly formed entity was valued at $113 billion, as stated by Musk. Then, last month, SpaceX merged with xAI. Musk mentioned that the merger was driven by his aspiration to establish data centers in space.