Alexander B. Spiro

The last time Alex Spiro lost a trial, he was a 25-year-old prosecutor. Since then, he said he has won all his trials and arbitration hearings — including convicting serial killer Rodney Alcala of two murders in 2013 when Spiro was still an ADA in Manhattan.

Winning trials hasn’t been easy lately. In his last six trials, he had to cope with “many unfortunate rulings” from judges. When that happens, “there’s usually a road that you can take if you find the facts that are right and you follow them. It may be a narrow road, but there is a road,” he said.

That approach, Spiro said, is how he pulled off his surprising defense victory in the lawsuit attacking Elon Musk’s 2018 tweet claiming he had “funding secured” to take Twitter private at $420 a share.

Spiro told the jury that just because Musk’s tweets were false didn’t mean he was guilty. Musk believed Twitter would be better as a private company and he believed he had a handshake deal for Saudi funding. “He believed he had to act and speak in that moment,” Spiro told jurors.

“Juries want to know who’s right and who’s wrong. And if you are on the side of the right and there’s a way for them to side with you … they’re going to side with you.”

The jury did side with Spiro and Musk on Feb. 3 last year. In Re Tesla, Inc. Securities Litigation, 3:18-cv-04865 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 10, 2018).

Spiro succeeded for Musk again in an employment racial discrimination case against Tesla. Two years before, a jury had awarded the plaintiff $137 million, one of the largest single-plaintiff discrimination awards in U.S. history. Spiro’s took the case through a retrial limited to damages only.

He was not allowed to introduce new evidence, and the jury was told it had to award punitive damages because Tesla’s conduct had been malicious. Spiro said he told the second jury that “things happened that should not have happened” to the plaintiff, but that the plaintiff exaggerated them and was untruthful. The second jury awarded only $3.127 million, a 98% reduction. Diaz v. Tesla, Inc., 3:17-cv-06748 (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 22, 2017).

Spiro also takes on significant pro bono projects. Jay-Z brought him on to represent a Black family who Kenosha, Wisc., police initially accused of hit and run, leading to a confrontation in an Applebee’s restaurant. Prosecutors later dismissed charges of resisting arrest.

— Don DeBenedictis