Tesla CEO Elon Musk in new court documents calls himself a "f---ing idiot" who was fooled by a convicted felon he hired to smear a diver who insulted him.
Musk is facing a defamation lawsuit after calling Vernon Unsworth, a British diver who helped rescue soccer players trapped in a Thai cave in 2018, a "pedo guy" and a "child rapist." Unsworth had touched a nerve after saying that Musk's offer to aid the rescue was just a publicity stunt.
Now Unsworth alleges Musk, after hiring a private investigator, orchestrated a "malicious, false, and anonymous leak campaign in the UK and Australian press," BuzzFeed News reports. But the private investigator, James Howard-Higgins, turned out to be a convicted felon who spent three years in jail for fraud and is currently in jail for a parole violation, and Musk in the filing admits the investigator "merely was, in retrospect, just taking us for a ride."
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Musk has claimed that "pedo guy" is just a "common insult" and that when he accused Unsworth of being a "child rapist" who married a 12-year-old in an email to a reporter, he thought it was off the record. In the documents, Musk calls himself a "f---ing idiot" for emailing the reporter this, concluding it's "one of the dumbest things I've ever done." Still, Musk's attorney in a statement called Unsworth's defamation case "nothing but a money-grab."
Unsworth also alleges that when Musk, who he calls a "thin-skinned billionaire," made this "child rapist" charge after learning that he met his bride when she was at least 18 or 19, meaning he knew the claim was false. In reality, the lawsuit says, Unsworth met his partner when she was 32. Musk in his deposition admits information from the private investigator "turned out not to be correct" and says that publicly declaring Unsworth a "pedo guy" in that original fateful tweet was only based on "maybe an hour" of Google searches.
