It’s happened. Grimes and Azealia Banks have officially been dragged into Elon Musk’s ongoing fraud case brought by allegedly-misled Tesla investors. The subpoenas, granted by the US district court of northern California, won’t instruct the musicians to provide evidence in court, as reported by Business Insider. But they will have to preserve certain documents, such as Insta messages and tweets, along with other evidence deemed “highly subject to deletion”.
Other subpoenas instructing the preservation of evidence will be served against Business Insider itself, along with The New York Times and Gizmodo.
If you’ve not been keeping up with the absolute fiasco that is Elon Musk’s fraud case – and you might be wondering why Grimes and Azealia Banks have to do with it – we’ll give you the rundown. Basically, when Elon tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share (apparently he’s into weed jokes) in August 2018, causing a spike of 11% in company shares, he failed to mention that he’d not actually secured funding. That’s what led him to be accused of misleading investors.
As for Azealia Banks, she was in Musk’s house around the same time, waiting to record a song with his girlfriend (Grimes, for the uninitiated), and in a series of tweets, she gave a little insight into what was going on.
This involved calling Musk and Grimes “crackheads” and alleging that Musk was tweeting on acid, so it’s pretty easy to imagine why she’d be of interest in the lawsuit. In fact, the complaint says Banks has “proven a key source of information” for the case, The Guardian reports.
Do drawn-out lawsuits about misleading investors get much more exciting? It’s very unlikely.