Elon Musk admitted he is a "fucking idiot" for smearing a British cave diver that helped save a dozen kids as a "child rapist" in an email to a BuzzFeed reporter, court documents in the ensuing defamation trial show.
A refresher: Last year, 12 kids and their soccer team coach were trapped in a cave in Thailand but emerged alive weeks later thanks to the efforts of rescuers, including British expat and Thailand resident Vernon Unsworth. Later, Unsworth criticized a "mini-sub" that Musk had his engineers build for the rescue effort as worthless and having "absolutely no chance of working." Musk retaliated by accusing Unsworth of being a "pedo guy" in a tweet to his millions of followers on July 15, 2018.
Musk also doubled down in an August 2018 series of emails to BuzzFeed News in which he referred to Unsworth as a "child rapist" and claimed the diver moved to Chiang Rai to marry a 12-year-old girl, citing a private investigator. (British tabloids later reported Woranan Ratrawiphukkun is 40 and met Unsworth in the UK less than a decade ago.) While Musk could charitably be called ignorant with respect to journalistic norms—he once cited an alleged sex cult's website as evidence that the media is biased against him—he really took that to the next level in his emails to BuzzFeed, which he assumed would not publish them because he prefaced them with "off the record."
That nothing one says to a reporter is actually off the record unless they affirmatively agree to it in advance is more or less a kindergarten-level lesson in media literacy. Well, Musk now realizes that he flunked that class. Court documents from Unsworth's legal team, based on info found during discovery, show he told a PR consultant: "I didn't expect Buzzfeed to publish an off the record email. My intent was to have them investigate and come to their own conclusions, not publish my email directly. Still, I'm a fucking idiot."
He added that it was "one of the dumbest things I've ever done," with Unsworth's legal team helpfully putting both of the quotes in boldface emphasis.
