Hot-tempered tweets turning risky for Musk

WHETHER it is investors betting against his stock or reporters or analysts who ask tough questions, Elon Musk has fought back, often around the clock on Twitter.

In the past few months, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has become a bigger, more snarling presence on social media.

But when Mr Musk, pictured, called a British diver involved in the Thailand cave rescue a paedophile in front of 22.2 million Twitter followers on Sunday, he may have gone one tweet too far.

The tweet, later deleted, sent investors away from Tesla stock and could expose the temperamental rocket scientist to a libel suit.

In the tweets, Mr Musk strayed from a vigorous defence of his companies into personal insult, with no facts to back it up.

“This has nothing to do with defending Tesla,” said Erik Gordon, a business and law professor at the University of Michigan. “This goes over a line where he can’t claim. ‘Well, my big sin is that I go too far in defending the company’.”

In a TV interview, British diver Vern Unsworth criticised Mr Musk and SpaceX engineers for sending a small submarine to help divers rescue the 12 Thai soccer players and their coach from a flooded cave. The submarine was not used.

Mr Unsworth called it a “PR stunt” and said it would not have worked. Mr Musk responded with a tweet branding Mr Unsworth a

“pedo.”