Technology
Elon Musk uses Twitter to defend calling British cave diver ‘pedo guy’
In a fitting end to a year of questionable tweets, Elon Musk is asking the courts to drop a defamation suit filed against him after insulting a British cave diver on Twitter this summer.
A motion to dismiss the case was filed Wednesday to the U.S. District Court in California’s Central District where Vernon Unsworth, a UK citizen, filed a complaint in September alleging Musk used defamatory language when Musk tweeted Unsworth was a “pedo guy,” then later sent an email to a BuzzFeed reporter accusing the diver of being involved in child sex trafficking. The tweets have since been deleted and Musk publicly apologized — on, you guessed it, Twitter.
Unsworth was part of a mission to rescue a Thai soccer team trapped in flooded caves in June and into July. Musk offered his companies’ engineering and systems expertise to build a rescue submarine, which Unsworth criticized.
Now Musk would like to put this all behind him, or as the motion says “end the war of words,” but in a statement to CNBC, Unsworth’s lawyer plans to pursue the case. Musk’s main defense is that his words were “non-actionable opinions” protected by the First Amendment even if they were offensive “imaginative attacks.”
In the motion, Musk calls Unsworth’s comments “indefensible and baseless” and that they prompted Musk to defend himself and his companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company.
Musk then “took to Twitter — a social networking website infamous for invective and hyperbole — to respond.” Later in the motion, Musk characterizes the social media site as the “rough-and-tumble Twitter platform.”
Since this was Twitter and not “a Boston Globe Spotlight exposé, a university press conference, or criminal complaint” the case against Musk and his “gratuitous barb” should be dismissed, his legal team argues.
Unsworth is seeking $75,000 in damages and a court order to stop Musk from making more allegations. Sounds familiar.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;
n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,
document,’script’,’https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘1453039084979896’);
if (window._geo == ‘GB’) {
fbq(‘init’, ‘322220058389212’);
}
if (window.mashKit) {
mashKit.gdpr.trackerFactory(function() {
fbq(‘track’, “PageView”);
}).render();
}
-
Business6 days ago
Tesla’s new growth plan is centered around mysterious cheaper models
-
Business7 days ago
UnitedHealth says Change hackers stole health data on ‘substantial proportion of people in America’
-
Business5 days ago
Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup, launches with a massive $1B, says it’s ‘ready’ to start developing drugs
-
Business5 days ago
UK probes Amazon and Microsoft over AI partnerships with Mistral, Anthropic, and Inflection
-
Entertainment4 days ago
Summer Movie Preview: From ‘Alien’ and ‘Furiosa’ to ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’
-
Business4 days ago
Petlibro’s new smart refrigerated wet food feeder is what your cat deserves
-
Business6 days ago
Two widow founders launch DayNew, a social platform for people dealing with grief and trauma
-
Entertainment6 days ago
Tesla’s in trouble. Is Elon Musk the problem?