(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk wants his upcoming fraud trial with Tesla Inc. shareholders moved out of San Francisco, saying jurors in the region will probably be biased against him because of recent layoffs at Twitter Inc. and “local negativity.”

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The billionaire who runs both Tesla and Twitter proposed the trial be held in western Texas, where Tesla moved its headquarters to Austin from northern California about a year ago, according to a filing by his attorneys late Friday.

A substantial portion of the San Francisco-area jury pool “is likely to hold a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of recent layoffs at one of his companies as individual prospective jurors — or their friends and relatives — may have been personally impacted,” the lawyers wrote. “The existing baseline bias has been compounded, expanded, and reinforced by the negative and inflammatory local publicity surrounding the events.”

Investors suing Tesla and Musk, its chief executive officer, argue that his August 2018 tweets about taking the electric-car maker private with “funding secured” were “indisputably false” and cost them billions of dollars by spurring wild swings in Tesla’s stock price. Musk has maintained that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had agreed to support his attempt to take Tesla private. The trial is set to begin January 17.

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“To be clear, this motion is not being brought simply because Mr. Musk has been the subject of negative news coverage. Mr. Musk has been a public figure for more than a decade and recognizes that being the subject of negative and even unfair media attention comes with the territory,” according to the filing. “The local media and political establishment have attempted to depict Mr. Musk as personally responsible for causing material economic harm to the significant number of potential jurors impacted by the layoffs and to the City of San Francisco as a whole.”