Elon Musk is no stranger to court proceedings, but you wouldn’t know that reading this deposition that was released Monday. Musk was deposed in a lawsuit over the Tesla CEO falsely tweeting that a college kid from a different state was secretly a federal agent sent to disguise himself as a neo-Nazi and start a fight with the Proud Boys to make conservatives look bad.
As Rolling Stone reports, the case in question involves a 22-year-old Jewish man named Ben Brody. Back in June, a group of Proud Boy thugs got into a fight with members of the neo-Nazi group, the Rose City Nationalists at Oregon City’s first Pride Night Fest, which they showed up to terrorize. People were able to begin matching names to faces using images posted online. In an attempt to paint the brawl as a “false flag” orchestrated by a federal agency, conservative accounts began to falsely claim that Brody was one of the participants.
Brody wasn’t even in Oregon at the time of the brawl, but that didn’t stop right-wing accounts from claiming he was a federal agent and sharing his personal information. Musk replied to one tweet, saying, “Always remove their masks,” and later replied to a separate post saying, “Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation.”
That second reply had more than a million views, and ultimately, the harassment became so serious that Brody and his family had to flee their home. He filed suit in October, and despite Musk’s lawyer’s attempts to keep the deposition confidential, the court released it to the public on Monday. And while Musk continually falling for right-wing conspiracy theories is kind of old news at this point, he somehow managed to make himself look even worse during the deposition.
Musk essentially admitted to everything Brody alleged in his lawsuit, including that he never looked for more information and got everything he thought he knew from those Twitter posts. When asked about whether or not he had looked at the account he replied to in order to see their other tweets, Musk said, “I wasn’t trying to assess their credibility.” He also claimed that he had “a limited understanding” of “what the lawsuit is about” and accused Brody’s lawyer of secretly being the one actually suing him to “[get] a lot of money.”
Musk also attempted to avoid taking accountability for not vetting the accounts he interacts with, saying that “if you’re suggesting that in order to reply to anyone, you have to scroll through all their posts, that would make it impossible to use the system.” He did however eventually say, “I’m guilty of many self-inflicted wounds.”
Other comments should definitely have investors concerned, including Musk saying, “I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it. I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public.” Nothing says “great investment” quite like the owner of a company admitting he’s hurting that company’s finances.
In an unexpected twist, Musk also admitted that he was behind an account with the handle @Ermnmusk that he used to role-play as his three-year-old son, posting things such as, “I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so fun,” and, “Do you like Japanese girls?” Why a billionaire wanted to pretend to be a child on the internet, we can’t say, but it’s definitely creepy and weird. Then again, this is Elon Musk we’re talking about, so creepy and weird kind of come with the territory.
Musk also admitted to having a second burner account that appears to have been misrecorded in the transcript as “baby smoke 9,000″ but is most likely @babysmurf9000. That one wasn’t as creepy and weird as the one where he pretended to be a toddler, but he did use it to call Mark Cuban an idiot, so there is that.
He also claimed that he had no idea that Brody had requested he retract his “false flag” posts and that despite millions of followers seeing his posts, he doesn’t agree that Brody “has been meaningfully harmed by this.” According to Musk, it’s “rare” for incidents like this one to have “a meaningful negative impact” on the victims.
Great guy, that Elon Musk. Truly our best and brightest.