Elon Musk said he was “guilty of many self-inflicted wounds” as he was questioned in a lawsuit accusing him of spreading a conspiracy theory that falsely identified a California man as a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi street thugs.
But the billionaire also said he didn’t imagine he had “caused significant harm” to the 22-year-old Jew who sued him for defamation.
“There is some risk that what I say is wrong, but one must balance that against a chilling effect on free speech generally, which would undermine the very foundation of our democracy,” Musk said in a sworn statement. which was released on Monday despite his lawyer’s request that the matter be kept confidential.
Musk was sued in Texas state court by Ben Brody in October after he supported a social media post that compared an Instagram profile of Brody to a photograph of a white supremacist violently attacking the police in Portland, Oregon Proud Boys clashed while each groups were protesting at a Pride event in the town.
Internet personalities cited the profile, which identified Brody as a University of California, Riverside political science student who planned to work for the federal government, as claiming that the road brawl was staged by authorities to discredit right-wing groups. Similar “false flag” claims were spread in regards to the Capitol revolt on January 6, 2021, in addition to a series of mass shootings.
Brody said in his lawsuit that he and his family have been subjected to a wave of harassment from “belligerent strangers” who gave the impression to be motivated by Musk’s statements. He said he also feared long-term consequences for his profession.
During Musk’s comment on social media brought him to court He was previously sued for defamation for the primary time since he bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and renamed it X.
Musk said within the March 27 statement that he didn’t know Brody and had no sick intentions toward him.
“My goal is simply for the X Platform to be the best source of truth on the Internet,” he told Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, in response to a 115-page transcript. “And when you try to find out the truth, there is a debate. This debate, as you know, goes one way or the other, but it is a lively debate.”
At one other point within the interview, Musk admitted that he was sometimes his own worst enemy.
Bankston asked him if he had told his biographer Walter Isaacson, “I’ve shot myself in the foot so many times that I should buy Kevlar boots.”
“Would you say that you knew since last summer that you were having trouble controlling your impulses on Twitter?” the lawyer asked.
“I would say that I – you know, I’m guilty of a lot of self-inflicted wounds,” Musk said.
