In a recently released deposition for an October 2023 defamation lawsuit, businessman and eternally online divorcée Elon Musk spoke about the impact his posts on X (formerly Twitter) have had on the business side of the social media site, which he purchased for $44 billion in October 2022. The deposition, which was recently made public and published in full by HuffPost is full of exactly what you’d expect from a man who wore a Dead Space t-shirt to livestream the Mexican border, who brought a gun to to a Cyberpunk 2077 recording session, and who was booed at a Valorant tournament last year.
The defamation lawsuit took place last fall, after Musk falsely identified a man named Ben Brody as a protestor at a neo-Nazi rally on X/Twitter. As HuffPost reports, the lawsuit alleges that Musk used his massive reach (he has nearly 180M followers on the site) to “amplify a false far-right conspiracy theory linking 22-year-old Ben Brody to a brawl in Oregon between the neo-Nazi group Rose City Nationalists and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist fight club.” Brody was not even in the same state in which the June 24, 2023 brawl occurred.
According to HuffPost, Musk was present at a two-hour-long deposition on March 27, shortly after which his lawyer, Alex Spiro, allegedly “filed multiple emergency motions in an attempt to keep the deposition sealed.” I can understand why. During the deposition (which you can read in full here), Musk admitted he had a “limited understanding” of the lawsuit he was being deposed for, and appeared to be confused over who was actually suing him—among other things.
At one point in the deposition transcript, Brody’s attorney (Mark Banskton) referenced the September 2023 biography of Elon Musk written by Walter Isaacson, in which Musk is quoted as jokingly saying, “I’ve shot myself in the foot so often, I ought to buy some Kevlar boots.” Bankston then asked Musk if, “as of last summer, that you knew that you had some difficulties restraining your impulses on Twitter?” Musk replied with “I wouldn’t say that” before saying he believed that the “bedrock of democracy is freedom of speech.”
After much back-and-forth, Bankston eventually asked Musk whether his purchasing of X affected the way he posts on the site, to which Musk replied that what he shares has “really remained unchanged before and after the acquisition.” He continued:
And going back to the sort of self-inflicted wounds, the Kevlar shoes, I think there’s—I’ve probably done—I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but certainly I—I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but by what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public.
Musk also admitted to running an alternative account (@ermnmusk) on which he has pretended to be his own son, who is a toddler. The account was the focus of an April 2023 Motherboard article titled “Is This Elon Musk’s Burner Twitter Account?” Several of the posts, which have since been removed from X/Twitter, appeared to have been written from the perspective of Musk’s child with musician Grimes. One read, “I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so fun.” The account, which still exists and has the username “Elon Test,” still regularly shares posts on the site, but does not appear to be from the perspective of a toddler anymore (though the profile picture depicts a young child).
In the deposition, Musk also stated that he didn’t believe Brody was “meaningfully harmed” by his false accusation.
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