Want the latest news on Elon Musk in your inbox? Sign up here !The twisty road to this week’s four-day trial in a federal courtroom began in the summer of 2018, when a Thai youth soccer team became stranded in a series of underwater caves in the country’s Chiang Rai province. Musk tweeted that he was sending a team of engineer employees to build a miniature submarine that would rescue the children from the caves. When a reporter asked Unsworth, a British-born cave diver based in Thailand and assisting with the rescue, about Musk’s ideas, the diver called them a “PR stunt.” Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts,” Unsworth said.
In response, Musk fired off tweets calling Unsworth a “pedo guy” and “sus.” Though the CEO later deleted the tweets, he doubled down on the insinuation a few weeks later, writing in August that he wondered why Unsworth hadn’t yet sued him if the allegations weren’t true. In September—after, the lawsuit later revealed, Musk’s family office had hired a con man to “investigate” Unsworth —Musk sent an email to a BuzzFeed News reporter suggesting Unsworth was a “child rapist.”
