Elon Musk Sued By Rescue Diver Following Twitter Attacks

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is getting himself into a lot of trouble on Twitter with Tweets that see no editor before they go out.

David Kiley

Tesla Motors CEO and founder Elon Musk is being sued by a rescue diver who helped save a team of stranded young soccer players in Thailand last July. Musk taunted the diver, Vernon Unsworth, alleging on Twitter that he is a pedophile after Unsworth criticized Musk’s own effort to rescue the team.

In what is said to be the first of two lawsuits, Unsworth is seeking $75,000 in damages for defamation in the District Court of California. The British cave diver is also expected to file a suit in the U.K.

"As one of the highest-profile and wealthiest individuals in the world, Musk knew that this accusations against Mr. Unsworth would be conveyed to a worldwide audience and would result in the accusations receiving massive publicity," the lawsuit says. A separate legal action will be pursued in the High Court of London for "reputational damage" Unsworth suffered in England and Wales, the suit states.

Unsworth made comments in a TV interview criticizing Musk’s offer and publicity to race to Thailand with a custom submarine to save the soccer team. Musk apparently saw the interview and began retaliating on Twitter calling him "pedo-guy." Musk subsequently took the Tweet down, and later apologized. But in August, the billionaire went after Unsworth again, alleging that he is a “child rapist” who moved to Thailand to take a child bride.

Michael “Max” Sneyd, an intellectual property and business law attorney at Detroit law firm Kerr-Russell, says Musk will have a hard time defending the charges because he is a de-facto celebrity and publicly made an unsubstantiated charge against a non-public person, Unsworth. “Truth is an absolute defense in libel cases, but malice is also a factor...and it appears on the surface as if Musk was seeking to defame a private citizen." And the fact that Unsworth was situationally thrust into the news by the rescue of the soccer players should not, says Sneyd, make him a "public person" in court.

Vernon Unsworth, who was a volunteer rescue diver in July's Thailand ordeal is suing Elon Musk for defamation and libel.


Musk is showing a pattern of mouthing off on Twitter that gets him in trouble. Last month, he Tweeted that he was thinking of taking Tesla, a publicly traded company, private with Saudi funding. Securities and Exchange Commission rules are very strict about what CEOs can say that might impact the trading of the company’s shares or move the stock price. Later, Musk reversed course, backing off the idea of taking the company private. But the episode has drawn not only an SEC investigation but a class-action lawsuit by shareholders who lost money.

The submarine Elon Musk developed to rescue the Thailand soccer team was never deployed. They were rescued by divers.

Given the small award being sought by Unsworth in a California court, the strong likelihood is that Musk will be advised by his lawyers to settle and get it out of the media. The amount of damages Unsworth will seek in his U.K. suit is undisclosed.

For a CEO who is currently building his best selling car under a makeshift open-air assembly line in California, one wonders why Musk has time for these diversions.


David Kiley covers the global auto industry for Forbes.com and other outlets. He is co-author of the 2015 book: Writing The War: Chronicles of a WWII Correspondent. Prometheus Books.

Currently, Editor-in-Chief of New Roads Media, I have covered all aspects of the auto industry for some thirty years for publications including USA Today, Businessweek, ...