“Sporadic thoughts,” “technical inaccuracies,” and “imperfect words” are how Elon Musk’s lawyer described his 2018 posts on Twitter about taking Tesla private.

But they were not fraud, Alex Spiro, a New York partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, told a jury in San Francisco on Wednesday. Despite his rushed actions and poor choice of words, the Tesla chief executive believed his tweets were true, he said.