During a webinar this week devoted to analyzing possible factors that fueled a $243 million jury verdict against Tesla, a lawyer not involved in the case fielded a question about Elon Musk’s impact.
Did animus toward Tesla’s CEO affect the size of the award, an audience participant asked Mike Nelson, a partner in the law firm Nelson Niehaus.
Nelson, who is also an expert in advanced driving assistance systems and electric vehicles, believes its possible that reactions to Musk may have played a role, but not quite in the way the questioner suggested.
“It’s hard to climb inside the mind of the jury…but these are huge numbers,” he said, referring not just to the $200 mi
llion in punitive damages but to $129 million in compensable damages awarded in the case Benavides vs. Tesla, decided last week. The compensable damage figure, for which the jury decided Tesla had 33% r
esponsibility (roughly $43 million), was set at this level even though jurors knew that the parties harmed in the accide
nt at the center of the case had already received a substantial amount of money in a separate settlement with the driver.
Related: Tesla Must Pay $243 Million Over Fatal Autopilot Crash
“To value a life [and] these injuries in the tens of millions of dollars is what seems to happen more and more nowada
ys. These would easily qualify for what lawyers called nuclear verdicts. And you usually find that when the jury is frustrat
ed, angry with the other party….They’re almost, in a way, adding their own punitive damages before they get to punitive damages,” Nelson said.
Returning directly to the question posed, “Do I think some of this is about Musk? Absolutely,” he said.
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While jurors with anti-Musk views were reportedly screened out the jury pool, Nelson said another factor could have put Musk at the center of deliberations. “He has so much identified himself as the party who launched this platform and is bringing it to fruition. He’s made it very much about him, even though there are plenty of people in that company,” said Nelson, who has tried cases against Tesla, including one as recently as a month and a half ago.
Without disclosing the status of that case, Nelson noted that his side tried to get a copy of a episode of the TV program 60 Minutes, featuring Musk taking his hands off the wheel of a Tesla in the early days of Autopilot, a partial self-driving feature that figured in the crash in the Benavides case.