Elon Musk on trial: CEO accused of defamation over 'pedo guy' remarks

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/03/elon-musk-defamation-trial-begins-in-case-brought-by-british-diver

Version 3 of 6.

LA court to hear Vernon Unsworth’s lawsuit over comments after Thai cave rescue

It was a gripping tale of peril and prowess that captivated the world for more than two tense weeks in the summer of 2018. Twelve boys and their football coach were lost in a subterranean maze in the Tham Luong caves in Thailand. An international team of cave divers raced to rescue them before monsoon rains were due to flood the caves. The story was destined to be fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster – and that was before an eccentric billionaire got involved.

On Tuesday, a postscript to the feelgood tale of the Tham Luang cave rescue will play out in a federal courthouse in Los Angeles as the trial begins in a defamation case brought by the British caver Vernon Unsworth against Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk.

Unsworth, a British national who lives in Thailand, was among the first divers to reach the scene of the boys’ disappearance. He was credited by rescuers for his detailed knowledge of the cave system, which helped locate the missing team.

Musk, the chief of Tesla and SpaceX, had also attempted to assist with the rescue; he assigned a team of engineers to design a miniature submarine that he hoped could be used to guide the boys through underwater tunnels. Although Musk delivered the submarine to the rescue site, the boys were rescued by divers, one of whom died during the operation.

Unsworth drew the ire of Musk following the rescue when he gave a brief interview to CNN and ridiculed his submarine, which he said “had absolutely no chance of working”. He added that Musk should “stick his submarine where it hurts”.

The billionaire entrepreneur lashed out at Unsworth on Twitter, where he called the caver a “pedo guy” to his 22 million followers. Under intense criticism from the public and his company’s investors, Musk apologised and deleted the tweets, but he subsequently revived the baseless allegations in another series of tweets about a month later. Musk also alleged in another baseless allegation that Unsworth was a “child rapist” in an email to a BuzzFeed reporter.

The jury selection process demonstrated Musk’s fame. Numerous potential jurors disclosed business ties to Musk’s various companies, which include Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, Open AI and Neuralink. Four were Tesla owners. One was dismissed when he said he could not be objective about the case because he was about to interview for a job with SpaceX, while two others were let go after saying they followed Musk on Twitter and knew the details of the case.

Only one potential juror, an aesthetician, admitted to having strong opinions about billionaires. She was dismissed. Another juror had “negative and positive” opinions about Musk, and he was allowed to remain.

Attorneys for Unsworth and Musk sketched the contours of their cases in opening statements before the eight empaneled jurors. Taylor Wilson, part of Unsworth’s legal team, focused on the number of times that Musk could have, but did not, clarify or retract his remarks about Unsworth.

“It wasn’t until a year later that Musk said in a deposition that ‘pedo guy’ just meant ‘creepy old guy’,” Wilson said. The result of Musk’s statements was “shame, mortification, worry and distress”, he added, “during what should have been one of the proudest moments in [Unsworth’s] life”.

Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, dismissed Unsworth’s defamation claim, casting the case as “insults between two men”. “He’s saying he’s been horribly damaged and he deserves lots of money,” Spiro said of Unsworth. “He doesn’t.”

Spiro described the “sleepless nights” Musk’s engineers spent “frantically trying to help” the boys. He cast Unsworth as the aggressor in the pair’s interactions, noting that the rescue was over and Musk had returned to the US when Unsworth gave his interview to CNN.

“When he saw this attack it did anger and hurt him,” Spiro said of Musk. “The real hurtful part was attacking the genuineness of his efforts. That could not go unanswered.”

Calling Unsworth a “pedo guy” was not an allegation of pedophilia, but instead a “fill-in-the-blank insult”, the attorney argued. Spiro also introduced an acronym that appears likely to feature heavily in his arguments to come: J-Dart. “It was a joking, deleted, apologized for, responsive tweet,” he said. “A J-Dart.”

Spiro also said Unsworth had not been harmed by Musk’s statements, noting that the cave explorer had since been honored by Queen Elizabeth and Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn, among others.

Testimony will begin Tuesday afternoon, and witnesses are expected to include Musk and Unsworth.

Tuesday’s trial follows a year of legal wrangling between Unsworth and Musk’s attorneys. Musk had attempted to have the case dismissed, arguing at one point that “pedo guy” is a common insult in his home country of South Africa and was not intended as an actual accusation of pedophilia. Court filings revealed that Musk had also hired a private investigator to attempt to substantiate his allegations against Unsworth.

The US district judge Stephen Wilson ruled in November that Unsworth was not a public figure, lowering the bar for the cave explorer to prove that Musk had defamed him.