Bad couple of weeks and days for Tesla/Twitter/X’s hairplugg’d troll-in-chief, or at least as bad as any days can be when you’re the second-richest man in the world.
Cybertruck owners have been taking to the Internet to gripe that their not-so-stainless-steel hulks start to rust after just a couple of months, take more than 14 hours to charge, and tap out of juice after about 250 miles, instead of the advertised 320.
Two weeks ago a judge tossed his lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, with US District Judge Charles Breyer saying the CCDH “has met its burden at the first step of the anti-SLAPP analysis” and straight-up calling Musk’s lawsuit “vapid.” (CCDH was repped by E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who’s sure got a knack for sticking it to The Man). Musk had sued the research group for pointing out that misinformation and hate speech have proliferated on his flaming-bag-of-dog-poo platform ever since he bought it, because advertisers never would have noticed that otherwise.
Then Monday, right before jury selection was set to begin, Tesla settled for an undisclosed amount with the estate of a former Apple engineer Walter Huang, 38, whose Tesla Autopiloted him off of a California highway to his death.
And also Monday, a court in Texas unsealed Elon’s deposition in the latest defamation case against him, which Mr. Free Speech’s lawyer Alex Spiro had frantically filed multiple emergency motions to keep secret. Apparently the emergency was that his client is an arrogantly stupid dickidiot who can’t help re-Tweeting conspiracy shit from fringe accounts, admits he’s been running the company into the ground for the LOLs, and doesn’t care who might get hurt from his shenanigans.
The defamation case was filed by one Ben Brody, a college student whom Elon falsely suggested last year was a “fed” (aka government plant) and part of a right-wing brawl. Elon boosted multiple conspiracy-theory Tweets about him over multiple days, even though Brody was clearly not the same guy, and was actually hundreds of miles away at a Dodgers game with his mom.
The fracas in question was in June of 2023 near an LGBTQ pride event in Oregon, where two far-right groups, the PDX Proud Boys and neo-Nazi Rose City Nationalists, took a break from spanking each other and snuggling in the woods, respectively, to meet up and harass and intimidate the gays. But they ended up screaming gay slurs at each other and getting into a punchfest instead. So emotional!
The Proud Boys started pushing the Rose boys with flagpoles (so phallic) and got a few kicks and whacks in, then started ripping off Rose boy masks. The footage caught the attention of the doomscrolling divorced father of 11, who queried his 180 million followers, “who were the unmasked individuals?”
Conspiracy theorists responded to the call, and Elon boosted their stories by interacting with articles from ZeroHedge and a Pepe-loving shitposting account called Dr. Frensor, which found Brody’s picture and personal information on the page of his college fraternity and said he was a “political science student at a liberal school on a career path towards the feds,” a storyline the big brains of Twitter quickly ran with, including the guy who wants to start a colony on Mars.
The Community Notes was supposed to fact check him, but guess that feature doesn’t actually work so great!
Another user shared the tweet and asked, “Remember when they called us conspiracy theorists for saying the feds were planting fake Nazis at rallies?”
“Always remove their masks,” Musk replied, a Tweet viewed 1.2 million times.
It took less than a day for Ben Brody and his family to have their home address leaked online and suffer a tsunami of threats, forcing them to move out. Brody posted to Instagram proof that he was not in Oregon, begged Elon to make it stop, and gave an interview to Vice News to try to clear his name, but it didn’t help much to stop the fake news from circulating.
As for Elon, it was all NBD though, and he still hasn’t even deleted the Tweet he’s getting sued over. The deposition transcript shows him pretending not to know by whom he’s being sued, or maybe he’s genuinely confused because he’s microdosing again, and finally admitting he just doesn’t give a shit.
From the transcript:
BRODY’S ATTORNEY MARK BANKSTON: You do understand that the amount of people who saw this, who have viewed this, is equivalent to all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums filled to capacity? You wouldn’t dispute that? I mean, we’re talking over a million people.
MUSK: Yeah, that’s actually — that may seem like a large number, but it is not compared to the fact — I believe there are something on the order of five to eight trillion views per year so a million is really —
BANKSTON: Not a big deal?
MUSK: — hit or miss, yeah.
BANKSTON: Not a big deal that this went out to that many people?
MUSK: Correct.
Does he agree Brody has been harmed? Asked the lawyer.
“I don’t think — I don’t think — I don’t think he has been meaningfully harmed by this … People are attacked all the time in the media, online media, social media, but it is rare that that actually has a meaningful negative impact on their life,” testified the guy who utterly lost his shit and hollered that he was in imminent danger when he found out a guy was posting publicly available data — a day later — about the movements of his private jet.
The man who also pushed conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi also admitted he didn’t check into the credibility of the claim about Brody one iota, but claimed that being able to make things up about random people was foundational to democracy:
“There’s some risk that what I say is incorrect, but one has to balance that against having a chilling effect on free speech in general, which would undermine the entire foundation of our democracy,” he claimed. Thank you Elon, for single-handedly keeping Democracy a thing!
He also admitted he knows he’s tanking the company, but it’s okay because he’s in it for laffs:
“I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but I certainly I — I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public.”
Brody’s lawyers are also trying to get Elon’s lawyer Alex Spiro sanctioned, because he is not admitted to the bar in Texas, and is also a dick. They called Spiro “astonishingly unprofessional, as he continually interrupted the deposition with commentary, gave numerous improper instructions not to answer, berated opposing counsel, insulted plaintiff’s claims, mocked counsel’s questions, and generally acted in the most obnoxious manner one could contemplate without crossing into parody.”
Brody is suing for $1 million and damages, which for Elon wouldn’t seem worth trifling with, so why not settle already? Why not find a Texas lawyer for a Texas case? Why don’t the Proud Boys and Rose boys kiss already? The world is full of men of mystery.
Elmo’s next court hearing for this one will be April 22.
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