Tesla CEO Elon Musk misled shareholders, ultimately costing them millions of dollars when he claimed in 2018 on Twitter that funding was already secured to take the automaker into private hands, a court has heard.

The federal class-action case is being heard in San Francisco where Musk himself is expected to take the stand and give evidence about the tweet and whether or not he and Tesla had a deal in place when it was posted in August 2018. Musk, Tesla, and the company’s board stand to lose billions of dollars if the jury finds that the maverick CEO’s social media post artificially inflated the EV maker’s stock price.

What’s not in doubt is that the price of Tesla’s stock rocketed after the tweets were posted. Jurors were shown this in graphical form that highlighted the spike in stock price, Auto News reports. 

Responding to an opening argument from attorney Nicholas Porritt that claimed Musk’s “lies” caused people to lose millions of dollars and that both he and Tesla need to be held accountable, while defense lawyer Alex Spiro told the jury that Musk genuinely intended to take Tesla private, but admitted that the tweets contained “technical inaccuracies.”

Related: Elon Musk Says Take-Tesla Private Tweet Was Totally Worth The $20 Million Fine

Spiro described Musk’s tweets as “a thought bubble,” and that the situation didn’t even come close to fraud and claimed that any inaccuracies in the Twitter messages “did not materially matter to the market” anyway because Musk was genuinely investigating how to take the automaker into private hands at the time. 

But Porritt told the court that Musk did not have any deal in place when he posted his initial tweet on August 7 and that his comments about Tesla going private for $420 per share were sent without giving Tesla’s board any advance notice. Musk finally announced that the plan to take Tesla private was being dropped on August 23, over two weeks after his initial tweet. Almost five years later Tesla remains a publicly listed company.