Elon Musk Calls Diver “Pedo Guy”; All Set To Go To Trial

Fresh from his settlement with the SEC, it looks like Elon Musk is about to head back to court AGAIN. And of course, it’s his twitter account that’s gotten him in hot soup.

Remember the Thai football team that got stuck in a cave last year? Musk claimed to be developing a submarine small enough to fit into the cave and extract the boys. As you can imagine, most people were rather skeptical about that. None more so than some of the actual divers involved in the rescue.

Vernon Unsworth, one of the divers, criticized Musk’s dubious plan to save the team with a “kid-sized submarine.” Elon Musk then hit back in probably the most Elon Musk way possible— He tweeted that Unsworth was a “Pedo guy”. He then took it a step further by emailing Buzzfeed to let them know that Unsworth had actually moved to Thailand “for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.” It’s worth noting that these claims were unsupported.

Needless to say, Unsworth wasn’t happy with those comments. He sued Musk for defamation last year and in spite of Musk’s best efforts to avoid trial, the Judge in charge of the case has determined that the defamation lawsuit is strong enough to go to trial, with the court battle due to start on October 22nd. While Musk’s attorneys argued that he was just stating his “opinion,” the judge rejected Musk’s claim that he wasn’t making a real accusation and pointed to the aforementioned emails that Musk sent to BuzzFeed.

“A reasonable fact-finder could easily conclude that [Elon Musk’s] statements … implied assertions of objective fact,”

District judge Stephen V. Wilson.

Just another day in the life of Elon Musk I guess. I’d advise him to get off Twitter but his tweets are pretty much golden..when he’s not mindlessly accusing people of being a pedophile that is.

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