Billionaire Genius Elon Musk Paid $50,000 to a Convicted Fraudster Claiming to be a Private Investigator

Elon Musk has a reputation as a genius inventor, which is funny because I don’t think he’s invented anything and I’m pretty sure he’s an idiot. I mean, for a smart person, he does a LOT of stupid stuff. Like the time he accidentally committed securities fraud on Twitter because he was mad people were shorting Tesla stock. Or his plan to nuke Mars. But his true oeuvre in the stupid arts was the time he claimed a guy was a pedophile because he didn’t like Elon’s useless metal tube.

He was apparently quite set on proving that this guy was a pedophile based on the fact that he was white and yet chose to live in Asia. And he was so mad that he insulted his sub that he paid a private eye over fifty thousand dollars to investigate him.

Except the guy wasn’t a private eye, he was a convicted fraudster who had cold e-mailed Musk offering to investigate the diver Musk was fighting with. You know, basically a more detailed version of the Nigerian Prince thing.

Buzzfeed News uncovered all the details.

Recently released court documents from a defamation case in US federal court show that Musk retained Howard-Higgins after the self-proclaimed investigator cold-emailed him offering to “dig deep” into Vernon Unsworth, a British expat who played a key role in the rescue of a boys soccer team from a Thailand cave system in July 2018. Unsworth, who had criticized Musk’s efforts to involve himself in the cave rescue, is now suing the billionaire for publicly calling him a pedophile and “child rapist,” an allegation partly based on unsubstantiated information given to him by Howard-Higgins.

How incredible is it that Musk not only sent a guy $50,000 based on a random e-mail, but he also took the ‘information’ the guy gave him and got himself sued. It’s almost too perfect for words.

And the really funny thing is that Unsworth may have a case. Law blog Popehat laid out the facts as writer Ken White saw that, which are that calling someone a pedophile is not defamatory because it’s an insult and an opinion. But he went on say that Musk’s e-mail to Buzzfeed claiming Unsworth had a 12-year-old child bride was a statement of fact and that can be defamatory. And we now know Musk heard that (by all appearances false) information from his internet PI.

I feel like one of these days we’re going to open Twitter and find out Elon Musk died and his last words were “Of course it’ll work, I’m a genius.”