The lawsuit is set to determine whether Elon Musk should be held liable for a 2018 tweet about financing a takeover of Tesla Inc. According to Reuters, a lawyer for the disgruntled shareholders said on Friday that the billionaire is not above the law, while Musk’s lawyer said his client is not a “Twitter monster.”

Shareholders accused Tesla’s CEO of misleading them on August 7, 2018, when he tweeted that he was considering taking the electric car maker private for $420 per share and that he had “secured financing.”

The price represented a 23% premium to Tesla’s last closing price, valuing the company at $72 billion.

Shareholders also accused Musk of lying when he tweeted later that day that “investor support confirmed.”

As Musk watched in a federal courtroom in San Francisco, shareholder attorney Nicholas Porritt said “this case is ultimately about whether the rules that apply to everyone else should apply to him, Elon Musk,” the second-richest person in the world

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, denied that financing was “a non-issue” for the Tesla acquisition, saying his client was not the “rich liar” and “fire-breathing Twitter monster” that the shareholders’ lawyers tried to portray him as. .

The lawsuit is a test of whether the billionaire CEO can be held accountable for his sometimes impulsive use of Twitter.

A nine-person jury will decide whether Musk’s tweets artificially inflated Tesla’s stock price by inflating the deal’s financing status, and if so, by how much.

Investors are demanding billions of dollars in damages from Musk, Tesla and several company executives.