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In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.
Soon afterward, Musk tweeted about Tesla, the electric-car company that he runs: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” To many people, the message suggested that Musk had arranged a buyout of the company; Tesla’s stock price rose almost eleven per cent by the end of the day. A week later, however, the Times reported that the potential backer, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, had never agreed to a deal. The stock price dropped, investors claimed that they had lost money as a result, and the Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating Musk for securities fraud.
Musk, like many billionaires, is perpetually at the center of dozens of lawsuits, and he has historically relied on establishment law firms for help. To handle the S.E.C. investigation, he turned to Williams & Connolly, an old-school Washington firm. For a suit arising from Tesla’s takeover of a solar-panel manufacturer, he brought in the élite corporate firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. To handle the potential defamation suit, however, Musk sought more aggressive representation. After briefly engaging Hueston Hennigan, a boutique practice in California, he reached out to a scrappy thirty-six-year-old attorney named Alex Spiro.
A partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Spiro has, in recent years, become one of the best-known trial lawyers in the country, a feat attributable to a streak of victories in high-profile cases and to frequent appearances in popular media outlets ranging from the Washington Post and the New York Post to the Shade Room and TMZ. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he possesses a plainspoken charm that clients and juries find beguiling. With that common touch, he’s come to specialize in protecting the rich and famous from the consequences of their poorest decisions.
Spiro represented Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who was accused of solicitation at the Orchids of Asia massage parlor in Jupiter, Florida (charges dropped). He defended the twenty-two-year-old son of the industrialist Peter Brant and the supermodel Stephanie Seymour when the young man, inebriated at J.F.K. Airport, punched a Port Authority police officer (charges dismissed after community service). He came to the aid of Alec Baldwin after the actor accidentally shot and killed a cinematographer with a prop gun on the set of the movie “Rust” (charges dropped). He has represented Jay-Z in multiple disputes, and Megan Thee Stallion, after Tory Lanez shot her at a party. He also does the kind of pro-bono work that makes headlines: assisting Kim Kardashian in her campaign against wrongful convictions, and pushing for prison reform in Mississippi with Jay-Z.
When Musk asked him to meet, Spiro flew to San Francisco from New York, dropped off his bags at a hotel, and headed to the Tesla headquarters, in Palo Alto. He was left there to wait for hours. (Spiro’s ego rivals that of many of the plutocrats and celebrities he represents, but he must suppress it when cultivating a new client.) Finally, Musk emerged, apologetic, and told Spiro he was headed to L.A., and that their meeting would happen on the way. Spiro thought ruefully of the luggage sitting in his hotel room as he followed Musk to his private plane. (Musk did not respond to The New Yorker’s request for comment.)
After asking Spiro a variety of mettle-testing questions, Musk hired him to handle the repercussions of his “pedo guy” tweet—a situation that Musk had recently made even worse. He had apologized to Unsworth and deleted the offensive tweet, but he had also scrambled to find evidence against the caver. Might he really be a pedophile? Musk hired a private investigator, to the tune of fifty thousand dollars, to explore whether Unsworth, a Brit who had lived part-time in Thailand for years, had a troubled history with underage girls.
After several days of research, the investigator reported some preliminary findings, including that Unsworth, who was sixty-three years old, had met his Thai girlfriend when she was eleven or twelve. Musk, evidently feeling emboldened, tweeted, “You don’t think it’s strange he hasn’t sued me?” Musk also sent an e-mail labelled “off the record” to Ryan Mac, who was covering the dispute for BuzzFeed News, telling him to “stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole.” In the e-mail, Musk described Unsworth as an “old, single white guy from England” who moved to a community known for sex trafficking “for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.” He added, “I fucking hope he sues me.” Mac had never agreed to keep the e-mail off the record, and BuzzFeed published it.
The private investigator, it turned out, was a convicted con man, and the allegations that Musk had passed along to BuzzFeed were false. Musk would later describe the e-mail to Mac as “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.” Still, when Unsworth filed a defamation suit, Musk was unwilling to settle. He wanted to go to trial, although most experts following the drama believed that he—and Spiro—had no case. David Lat, a former federal prosecutor who writes the legal newsletter “Original Jurisdiction,” said, “A lot of us thought Musk was toast.”
At the trial, which took place in Los Angeles, Spiro portrayed Unsworth—who testified that being branded a pedophile had made him feel “humiliated, ashamed,” and effectively sentenced by popular opinion to a “life sentence without parole”—as an egomaniacal bully. The true victim, in Spiro’s telling, was Musk, an idealist and a business visionary who had been unjustly injured by the caver’s disparagement of his submarine. As Spiro recalled to me, “They wanted to make the case about the rich billionaire who decided to defame this guy, and I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to tell the story of how he went there to save these kids, not about the fucking spelunker who tried to steal the spotlight.”
Standing six feet two with blue eyes and the broad-shouldered physique of a professional athlete, Spiro has an undeniable magnetism in the courtroom. During Musk’s trial, he lumbered around in an orthopedic boot (he’d ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball), arguing that Unsworth, in his hunger for publicity, had not only maligned Musk’s contribution to the rescue but also exaggerated his own role in it. The facts weren’t entirely in Spiro’s favor. Musk’s sub, which had created a media frenzy, was judged too large to wend through the narrow passageways of the caves where the boys had been trapped; Unsworth’s expertise in the cave system’s structure had, by the account of the lead diver, proved essential to the rescue. He had created a detailed map of the area and helped recruit and advise the divers who eventually brought the boys to safety.
Before the jury, Spiro’s core argument was that an impetuous tweet shouldn’t get someone sued. To help make that case, he offered the jurors an acronym: JDAR. It stood, he said, for a joking, deleted, apologized for, responsive tweet. Unsworth, he claimed, had made a big deal out of nothing—a silly JDAR—just to promote himself on television. And the fact that use of Musk’s e-mail to BuzzFeed was limited in court was almost certainly to Spiro’s advantage.
Spiro is “a bit of a cowboy, and he’s very good at it,” G. Taylor Wilson, one of Unsworth’s lawyers, told me. “He framed the case as this sort of back-and-forth joke: Why are we in court over this ‘pedo guy’ tweet?” What had started out as a serious matter—a heroic volunteer being falsely branded a child molester—suddenly seemed no more than a petty accusation, a waste of the jury’s time. After less than an hour of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
“My faith in humanity is restored,” Musk said as he left the courtroom. Wilson, for his part, thinks that humanity might be better off, and public discourse more civil, had Unsworth prevailed. “I do think that Twitter and social media in general would be a bit different if we had not lost that case,” Wilson said.
Before long, Musk would call on Spiro again. With the help of his Williams & Connolly counsel, Musk had settled with the S.E.C. over the “funding secured” tweet: Musk and Tesla were each obliged to pay a fine of twenty million dollars, and Musk agreed to establish a board committee to oversee his tweets and other communications. However, he soon came to regret the settlement. And so, in January, 2019, when a group of investors filed a consolidated class-action fraud suit against Musk and Tesla over the tweet, alleging that they had lost more than a billion dollars, Musk decided to turn to the cowboy.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville described lawyers as “the most intellectual section” of American society, and “the most powerful barrier” against “the unreflective passions of democracy”—a source of restraint in times of populist impulses. A century and a half later, lawyers are perhaps less averse to exploiting unreflective passions. The O. J. Simpson trial brought television cameras into the courtroom and heralded the rise of the popular legal spectacle—a spectacle that fed on daily drama and conflict. The Simpson defenders Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert Kardashian became celebrities themselves, combining, each in his own fashion, theatrical technique and an intimate knowledge of how modern media works. In the twenty-first century, social media brought clips of courtroom performances to vast audiences. In this volatile environment, Spiro thrived.
“When a case is in the public eye, you have to be conscious of that when you’re litigating it,” he once told the Harvard Crimson. “And how you deal with that and interact with the court of public opinion matters.”
On a recent afternoon, Spiro was in the Coconut Grove, Miami, offices of Quinn Emanuel, which has thirty-three branches around the world. (Spiro and his family relocated to Miami from Brooklyn Heights during the pandemic.) “It’s a not-so-secret of mine, I fucking hate experts,” he told several colleagues on a video call, as they debated hiring an outside consultant for a foreign-bribery case involving a multinational corporation. Spiro believes that hired experts who testify in a trial often come across to jurors as insincere hacks, and that the reports the experts submit in discovery can tip off his opponents about how he plans to present his side of the case. As Spiro and his colleagues reviewed the staggering cost of bringing in an A-list consultant, he was simultaneously carrying on a conversation over text. Out the window, yachts were sparkling on Biscayne Bay.
At the firm, Spiro has more than a hundred people working with him, and he juggles some fifty cases at a time. A single big case may involve four partners, another eight attorneys below them, and a handful of paralegals, researchers, and investigators. This “cavalry,” as Spiro sometimes calls his team, does much of the day-to-day preparation, including the writing of briefs. But when a case goes to trial Spiro conducts most of the openings, closings, and cross-examinations himself.
Spiro sometimes likens what he does in those openings and closings to making a painting. The experience can be so intense that afterward, he told me, he can’t always remember what he did with his brush. “There’s a flow to it,” he said. “I’m trying to tell a compelling, interwoven story. And there are hints I’m dropping throughout cases, for the jury.” Michael Lifrak, a Quinn Emanuel partner whom Spiro refers to as his lieutenant, notes that those arguments stem from considerable front-end labor. Spiro “will look at every document in the case,” he said. “I have never seen a first-chair trial lawyer do that, and I’ve been doing this for more than twenty years. He dives into the details. And that’s probably one of the reasons that clients like him.” Another reason clients like Spiro is that, by his own account, he’s won every case he’s brought to trial in a decade of private practice.
“I have a photographic memory, basically—that’s my special secret sauce,” Spiro told me. “That and my ability to sleep three and a half hours a day and process information quickly. If it weren’t for those things, I would have zero chance of survival.” He’s also shrewd in his choice of jurors. He looks for people whom he could “take out for a cup of coffee and convince of my point of view” and those who might be inclined to like him—for instance, he believes that Black Americans may be particularly aware of his representation of professional basketball players in police-brutality cases and of his connections to Jay-Z and other hip-hop artists. In the courtroom, an environment Spiro describes as “me in my swimming pool,” he often forgoes slick PowerPoint presentations, scribbling on poster boards instead. He sometimes puts witnesses on the stand with minimal preparation, in the belief that their testimony will seem more authentic.
After the meeting, he packed up and walked home, his body listing to one side on account of yet another basketball injury. On the way, he consulted by phone first with a celebrity whose endorsement deal had run into legal problems, and then with a client who had to testify before a grand jury. In addition to his official cases, he has “lots of ‘situations,’ ” he said. “Somebody called me the other week, through a friend, and said somebody was in custody in a foreign country, and could I make a phone call.”
Spiro’s vanity is much discussed among his colleagues and his rivals. One attorney who has worked with him said, “He’s a bright young man, but he’s an incredibly good self-promoter. We used to make fun of him—he’s a ‘one-upper.’ He knows everyone and knows everything.” A former colleague told me, “I think the key to Spiro is that he has this form of fearlessness, which is good, and can also be really problematic for a lawyer. It’s like being a Sherpa without any fear. You’re climbing Everest with a client, and you both could fall off the mountain.”
Part of Spiro’s legal playbook is arguing, sometimes implicitly, sometimes brazenly, that famous and powerful people should be treated differently from ordinary citizens. Before meeting with Musk for the first time, Spiro was helping Jay-Z resist the S.E.C.’s request that the impresario testify in person in a case involving the accounting practices of Iconix Brand Group, a company that had bought his apparel line, Rocawear. When the S.E.C. declined to waive its rules about in-person testimony, Spiro countered that Jay-Z was so busy that he could testify for only two hours. The S.E.C. rejected the time limit, and the parties ended up arguing about the matter in federal court. At one point during a hearing, the judge turned his attention to Spiro and said, “With all due respect to Mr. Spiro, it’s not his job to determine what information the S.E.C. does or does not need to conduct its investigation, or in what format that information should be provided.” In the end, though, the judge urged the S.E.C. to get its questioning done in one day.
“I’m not a huge believer in people trying to slow me down,” Spiro told me recently over lunch in Miami, Visine in his pocket and his leg jiggling under the table. “There’s somebody I know who describes me as ‘irreverent.’ I think that’s accurate. I’m probably difficult to manage.” Yared Alula, Spiro’s friend and former law-school classmate, told me of Spiro, “He looks at any institution, any rule, as just an opening salvo in a negotiation.”
Spiro’s mother, Cynthia Kaplan, a clinical psychologist who specializes in child and adolescent trauma, noticed that her son was a debater from the start. “At eighteen months, he talked like he does now,” she said. “I remember him saying, ‘Actually, Mom,’ at that age.” He was the first of four children, and spent his early years in Manhattan, where his father, a dentist and an athlete, often brought Spiro along to weeknight basketball games.
Shortly before Spiro started kindergarten, his family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts. Several years later, Spiro’s comfortable suburban life began to unravel—his parents split up, his mother was working long hours at a hospital, and his father was given a diagnosis of a degenerative neurological disorder, which eventually rendered him blind and unable to walk without assistance. Spiro was suddenly on his own much of the time. “I think he had to fend for himself a lot,” his mother told me. “He became more competitive, more determined in those years.”
When Spiro was in high school, his mother helped him get a job at McLean, the psychiatric hospital where she now worked. There, Spiro spent time with young people who had been given a diagnosis of a spectrum disorder, and was mentored by Shervert Frazier, a prominent psychiatrist who specialized in schizophrenia. Spiro decided to major in psychology at Tufts, and continued working with Frazier. One day, Spiro recalls, Frazier’s assistant told him, “You won’t shut up. You should go to law school.”
The idea took hold, and Spiro entered Harvard Law School in 2005. While studying, he accepted a fellowship with the C.I.A., and, after graduation, he joined the Manhattan D.A.’s office as a junior prosecutor. Spiro was not, fellow-prosecutors recall, a deft writer of briefs, but he stood out in the office for how aggressively he sought to work on cases that were going to trial. Elliot Felig, who overlapped with Spiro as a prosecutor, said, “He loved the courtroom. He would go door to door and say, ‘You have anything that’s going to trial?’ He’d be happy to take cases from colleagues that were trial-ready.” He lost a couple of cases, and won more.
In 2010, Cyrus Vance, Jr., became District Attorney and created a unit to reëxamine unsolved cases. Before long, Spiro was helping two senior colleagues revive a cold case against a notorious serial killer, Rodney Alcala, who was often called the Dating Game Killer because he’d been a contestant on the TV show decades earlier. Alcala was already on death row in California for killing four women and a twelve-year-old girl. But, back in the nineteen-seventies, he had also been a suspect in the brutal deaths of two women in New York.
Spiro seized on the opportunity to be part of the high-profile murder case. He reinterviewed old witnesses and eventually helped secure Alcala’s indictment for both murders. In 2012, Alcala pleaded guilty.
Martha Bashford, one of the lead prosecutors, credits Spiro for pushing the case forward, though she acknowledged he wasn’t the most politic employee in the office. “Alex reminded me of when you have a new puppy,” she said. “They’re just so excited. They run around, their tails wag, and they often knock things over.”
Spiro also worked on the prosecution of Travis Woods, another notorious murderer, who was known as Trav-ice in the neighborhoods around Harlem, his base. Woods had been tried for murder three times; each time, the jury failed to reach a verdict. Spiro helped bring the case to trial a fourth time, the office won a conviction, and Spiro decided that it was the moment to move on.
“Being a defense lawyer was very natural to me,” he told me. “I find it compelling to help people and fix their problems, right the wrongs. Corny as it sounds.”
Figuring that he wouldn’t fit in at a big firm—“too corporate for me, too many blocks and barriers and bureaucratic rules”—in 2013 Spiro took a job at a boutique firm led by the legendary defender Benjamin Brafman. Brafman, a self-described “short Jewish guy” who’d performed on Catskills comedy stages while in college, has a reputation as fierce and self-consciously flamboyant. His client roster included the hip-hop producer Sean (Diddy) Combs (acquitted of gun possession and bribery after a night-club shoot-out); the hedge-fund manager Martin Shkreli (convicted of stealing millions of dollars from investors); and, later, Harvey Weinstein (convicted of myriad sexual-assault charges). Under Brafman, Spiro, eager for clients, networked at parties and at sporting events.
A trader at a big bank who had been charged with fraud told me that Spiro had counselled, “If you play softball, you’re not going to get anywhere—you’ve got to push the limits a bit and be aggressive.” Spiro convinced the trader to let him hire a private investigator to interview potential witnesses before the government got to them. “Even back then, when he didn’t necessarily have the track record to back it up,” the trader said, Spiro “was so confident that you just tended to believe him.” In the end, the trader was acquitted.
At around 2 A.M. on April 8, 2015, a forward for the Indiana Pacers was stabbed outside 1 OAK, a Manhattan night club, and Thabo Sefolosha, a forward for the Atlanta Hawks, was on the street outside as the N.Y.P.D. tried to clear the block. Sefolosha, who is Black, got into a dispute with JohnPaul Giacona, a white police officer. Sefolosha told the officer, whom he called a “midget,” that he could act like a “tough guy” only because he had a badge. According to Sefolosha, Giacona responded, “With or without a badge, I’ll fuck you up.”
Sefolosha and a teammate were about to leave when Sefolosha started walking back in the direction of the officers, trying, he later said, to give twenty dollars to a man who was begging for money. A video shows a group of officers surrounding Sefolosha and wrestling him to the ground.
Sefolosha was arrested, taken to a holding cell, and charged with resisting arrest. His leg throbbed; he later learned that during the arrest his fibula had been broken—an injury that would end his season and diminish the Hawks’ hope of winning in the playoffs. Around dawn that morning, Spiro, who’d received a call from a Hawks lawyer, appeared at the precinct to represent him.
Sefolosha told me that his first thought on seeing Spiro was how young he looked. “But then he came in and took charge of the whole situation,” Sefolosha said.
After many meetings at the Manhattan D.A.’s office, his former workplace, Spiro received an offer from the prosecution: a deal that would lead to the dismissal of the charges in six months, but without an admission of fault on the part of the officers. To Sefolosha, any agreement that let the officers off the hook was unacceptable. “It was a no-brainer for me,” he said. “We had to go to trial.”
During an evening stroll in Coconut Grove, near the luxury residential tower where he lives, Spiro reënacted one of the moments in Giacona’s cross-examination. Spiro had asked Giacona if he remembered saying to Sefolosha, “I’m going to fuck you up.” Giacona replied, “Not that I recall.” Spiro’s eyes bulged as he recounted the moment. “You don’t remember the most important day of your life?” he bellowed, jabbing his finger at the imagined cop. “You were in the fucking New York Post. You don’t remember staring into the eyes of the starting forward for the Atlanta Hawks?”
On October 9, 2015, the jury, after around forty-five minutes of deliberation, acquitted Sefolosha. He later filed a civil lawsuit against the officers and the city, and received a settlement of four million dollars.
Spiro’s pugnacious style is very much in the Brafman mold, but people close to Brafman told me that the older lawyer now says he regrets hiring Spiro. David Jaroslawicz, a civil attorney who worked with them both, said of Spiro, “I think he wanted to be the No. 1 man in the firm, and as long as Brafman didn’t retire he was the No. 1 man.”
As Spiro began mulling his next career move, shortly after Sefolosha’s acquittal, he experienced what he considers one of the greatest disappointments of his career. He was representing Thomas Gilbert, Jr., who had murdered his father, the hedge-fund founder Thomas Gilbert, Sr., in midtown. At the time of the murder, Spiro had known Thomas, Jr., a Princeton graduate, for years. His mother, Shelley, had originally hired Spiro to smooth things over when her son was expelled from the family’s Hamptons country club for reportedly threatening an employee. Thomas, Jr., was thirty years old and had received diagnoses of severe compulsive disorder, depressive disorder, paranoid disorder, and psychosis.
The patricide was covered in lurid detail in the press. Thomas, Sr., had just reduced his son’s weekly allowance. Thomas, Jr., came to his parents’ apartment, sent his mother out to buy a sandwich, shot his father in the head, placed the gun in his dead father’s hand, and fled. When his mother returned to the apartment and discovered the horrifying scene, she called 911 and told the dispatcher that her son was “nuts” and had killed his father.
Shelley told me that Spiro’s experience at McLean gave her confidence that he understood mental illness, “which most of society did not.” Spiro’s goal was to have Thomas, Jr., put in psychiatric in-patient care rather than tried for murder, and he was buoyed when two court-appointed psychiatrists found his client too ill to be tried. (“I put everything I had into that case,” Spiro said.) However, a forensic psychologist hired by the prosecution convinced the judge that Gilbert was sane enough to stand trial. With a conviction now looming, Spiro dropped Thomas, Jr., as a client. Shelley’s legal fees were mounting, and Spiro was planning to accept a partnership at Quinn Emanuel. He was reluctant to carry the murder case to his new firm, where he would soon be the most celebrated partner—the star he wasn’t able to be at Brafman’s shop.
Spiro can plausibly claim that in private practice he’s never lost a case before a jury in part because he’s canny about what he takes on and what he walks away from. Shelley Gilbert did not blame Spiro for dropping the case, but a subsequent lawyer, whom he had recommended, was unsuccessful. In 2019, Thomas, Jr., was convicted and sentenced to thirty years to life.
The rapper Bobby Shmurda stands out among Spiro’s clients for having publicly criticized the lawyer’s work on his behalf. In 2014, when Shmurda was twenty-one years old, with his music career just taking off, he was arrested and charged with, among other things, weapons possession and conspiracy to sell narcotics and to commit murder. The evidence against Shmurda included wiretaps and witnesses. He pleaded not guilty, was held on two million dollars’ bail, which his family was unable to raise, and spent more than six hundred days in jail awaiting trial. Shmurda called in Spiro, who advised him that the evidence was compelling and that he should consider accepting a global plea deal, in which he would admit guilt on two charges and, like, most of his co-defendants, receive a seven-year sentence. The alternative was going to trial and risking more time behind bars. Shmurda accepted the plea. However, at the sentencing hearing the musician attempted to fire Spiro on the spot, telling the judge, “I was forced by my attorney to take this plea. I do not want to take this plea!” (Shmurda did not respond to a request for comment.) Spiro denies forcing the plea on Shmurda, and points out that a co-defendant who didn’t accept the deal was later sentenced to more than a hundred and seventeen years.
Spiro sometimes struggles to project a coherent righteousness from the wild mashup of cases and personalities he embraces. In conversation, he can make his arguments on behalf of Elon Musk sound as noble as his crusade, in the late twenty-tens, for New York bail reform. But several people who worked with Spiro rolled their eyes at his attempts to frame himself as primarily a do-gooder. They saw him instead as an opportunist.
In 2016, the former N.F.L. star Aaron Hernandez, who was serving time for a murder conviction, hired Jose Baez, a high-profile defense lawyer, and then Ron Sullivan, who’d been a mentor of Spiro’s at Harvard Law, to help him fend off another grave charge—this one for a double homicide in Boston. The lawyers brought in Spiro, but the team soon parted ways. According to Baez, Spiro stepped back from the case early on, “before we even started working on it.” Nonetheless, he has taken credit for being one of the attorneys who helped secure Hernandez’s against-all-odds acquittal.
Early this year, the lawsuit filed by Tesla investors who claimed that Musk’s “funding secured” tweet had defrauded them went to trial in San Francisco. Spiro’s team included about twenty Quinn Emanuel lawyers. Musk’s reputation had deteriorated in the three years since Spiro had helped him avoid repercussions for vilifying the caver who had helped rescue the boys’ soccer team. Now, when prospective jurors filled out questionnaires, some described Musk as, variously, “the next Trump,” “a delusional narcissist,” “arrogant,” “irrational,” and “crazy.”
Spiro’s understanding of Musk had no doubt evolved, too. He’d just come off a brief role handling legal matters for Twitter, which Musk had purchased the previous fall. The company was carrying about thirteen billion dollars of debt as a result of Musk’s buyout, and advertisers were fleeing. Musk’s panic was palpable as he introduced, and then abandoned, new initiatives to generate revenue. He also fired entire teams, reducing Twitter’s staff by about fifty per cent in a matter of days. The chief privacy officer, the chief information-security officer, and the chief compliance officer left. One afternoon, when morale was especially low, Spiro addressed the staff at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, making an impassioned case for sticking with Musk and trusting in his genius. Not long afterward, following a heated discussion with Musk in a glass-walled conference room, Spiro began spending less time at Twitter. (The Times reported that Musk had soured on some of Spiro’s decisions.) But he remained Musk’s go-to lawyer.
Before the Tesla-investor trial began, the judge ruled that the lawsuit had established both that Musk’s tweets were false and that Musk had made them recklessly—effectively, a partial decision in favor of the plaintiffs, signalling that Musk could be held liable for their losses. To prevail, the investors now needed to establish that Musk’s Twitter statements had caused the stock-price movements.
Opening arguments took place in mid-January. The plaintiffs were represented by a team led by Nicholas Porritt, a British partner at Levi & Korsinsky, who had previously recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in a shareholder lawsuit against Larry Page and the board of Google. Porritt began by telling the jurors that they were there because Elon Musk had lied, causing Tesla investors to lose “millions and millions of dollars.” Spiro, in his opening, reprised his best lines about Musk as a truth-telling visionary. Musk was considering taking Tesla private and, Spiro claimed, had access to the financial resources to do it. The “funding secured” tweet was inconsequential, he said—“not even a full sentence. It’s a thought bubble.” Spiro conceded that Musk, rushed and distracted, had chosen his words artlessly, but, he emphasized, “this was all done for the mission, it was all done for the shareholders, and it was all done in good faith.”
Three days later, Musk, flushed and wearing a dark-brown suit and combat boots, marched into the courtroom to testify. Porritt questioned him about, among other things, his habit of publishing information about Tesla on Twitter, and the impact of his tweets on the company’s stock price. (Musk said that it was difficult to correlate Tesla’s stock price to any particular tweet.)
When Spiro’s turn came, his line of questioning became almost comical in its intent to make the billionaire seem at once relatable and untouchable. Spiro asked Musk what his childhood was like (“not good”), and about immigrating from South Africa to Canada when he was seventeen, and why he’d moved to the U.S. as soon as he could (“it is where great things are possible”). At Spiro’s prodding, Musk talked about working his way through college and graduating with a hundred thousand dollars of debt. He listed the many companies he had founded or helped found. “I think I’ve raised more money than anyone in history at this point, by a significant margin,” Musk said. “But, you know, the reason I’m able to raise money easily is because investors trust me to be truthful and responsible with their money.”
Spiro, delivering his closing argument in a thundering voice, returned to Musk’s humble background and pure intentions, then homed in on his point. “Ultimately, whatever you think of him, this isn’t a bad-tweeter trial,” Spiro said. “It’s a did-they-prove-this-man-committed-fraud trial. And you know he didn’t.”
As the jury left to deliberate, Spiro and his cavalry repaired to a bar a few blocks from the courthouse. They had yet to finish the first round of drinks when one of Spiro’s colleagues received a message that the verdict was in. They rushed back to the courthouse to learn that they had won.
In the months since the verdict, Spiro has sometimes worried that his chosen career isn’t challenging enough, and has considered doing something else. He was recently approached to head an activist investment fund, he said, and to run several companies. But he wondered whether such jobs would give him the same thrill as working the courtroom. When Musk came calling again, earlier this month, to threaten Meta with a lawsuit over Threads, its new Twitter competitor, and, a second time, with a bid to curtail a Federal Trade Commission investigation into Twitter’s data-security practices, Spiro signed on. “There’s no other fight like this,” he told me, eyes gleaming. “What other sophisticated profession is this binary, where somebody wins and somebody loses? ” ♦
