April 19, 2022: -The shareholders who are suing Tesla and CEO Elon Musk over alleged securities fraud said in a court filing on Friday that they won part of a critical ruling in their class-action lawsuit.

The shareholders have decided to sue Tesla as they lost the Money after Musk tweeted back in 2018 that he thought of taking his electric vehicle company private at $420 for each share and said he had secured funding.

The Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Musk with civil securities fraud due to what he had tweeted. Tesla and Musk struck a revised settlement agreement in 2019 regarding those charges, but Musk is now trying to terminate that agreement.

Damages from the shareholders’ class-action lawsuit could amount to billions of dollars paid by Musk and Tesla to the class members.

On Friday, the shareholders’ attorneys said in the filing out that Judge Edward M. Chen, who presides in this matter, had concluded that Musk acted with scienter, that he knowingly made false statements about having funding secured in the tweet.

The request for the temporary restraining order alludes to Judge Chen’s earlier ruling that is under seal as it refers to evidence that Musk’s team regarded as confidential. “We anticipate the order will be published soon,” Adam Apton of Levi & Korsinsky, lead counsel for the class of Tesla shareholders, told CNBC.

At the TED conference, Musk called financial regulators in the SEC’s San Francisco office “bastards.”

Musk said, “The SEC knew that funding was secured, but they had an active, public investigation nonetheless at the time. Tesla was in a precarious financial situation. And I was told by the banks that if I did not agree to settle with the SEC they would, the banks would cease providing working capital, and Tesla would go bankrupt right away. So that’s as if having a gun to your child’s head. I was forced to concede to the SEC unlawfully.”

The reason is unclear why he may have been unable to obtain working capital for Tesla, but he was confident he could muster the billions required to take the company private at a similar time.