He’s the world’s richest man with a fortune valued at $262 billion. An outspoken Trump supporter, Elon Musk runs SpaceX, Tesla and Starlink. And as the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, he styled himself as a free speech absolutist.
But an investigation by Tortoise – an online news site — finds that while Musk likes to tell it like it is, he’s used private investigators and surveillance to keep other people quiet, targeting everyone from whistleblowers at his companies, to media critics and people in his private life.
One of those people is a British caver who helped save the lives of 12 Thai children. Back in 2018, when Vernon Unsworth was trying to rescue the members of a youth football team, aged 11-16, and their 25-year-old coach, who were trapped deep in a cave system in northern Thailand.
Rising water levels meant the team was out of contact with the outside world for more than a week. Even after they were found, three miles from the cave mouth, rescuers faced a huge challenge getting them out.
An audacious plan was put in place to drug the boys using ketamine before diving them out while unconscious. It worked. By 10 July, all the boys and their coach were rescued alive.
Unsworth had worked for 17 days straight coordinating the rescue when he was asked on CNN about Elon Musk. From the US, Musk had offered to send over a “tiny, kid-sized submarine” to help with the rescue.
Vernon told CNN that the sub was a non-starter and that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts”. Musk retaliated by calling Unsworth a “pedo guy” – on Twitter. Unsworth sued Musk for defamation.
Musk’s team then paid about $50,000 to a private investigator called James Howard-Higgins to dig up dirt on Unsworth. Howard-Higgins told his client he would go through Unsworth’s trash, pose as a charity worker to get information, and infiltrate his partner’s Facebook page.
At the US trial, which Musk won by portraying his Twitter comments as a joke, his team portrayed Howard-Higgins as a one-off. In fact, Tortoise found another investigation firm called Orion was also tasked with getting information on Unsworth.
Emails show how Orion emailed one of Unsworth’s friends, telling him, incorrectly, that they were “working on behalf of Vernon”. According to the website, evidence suggests Orion’s ultimate client was Musk.
Others allegedly surveilled by a private investigator for Musk include a Tesla whistleblower. Musk deployed private investigators to follow the employee “24 hours a day”. A former security operative at Tesla alleges the company also hacked into the employee’s phone. Other whistleblowers also allege that they were followed. Tesla has denied any wrongdoing.
According to Tortoise, Musk allegedly placed his former partner, actress Amber Heard under surveillance in Australia, when she was filming Aquaman in 2017, having become suspicious that she was cheating on him.
Around the same time a local newspaper received an anonymous tip that a professional footballer was “spending many nights at Amber Heard’s house” and “leaving early in the morning looking like the cat that swallowed the canary”.
The paper traced the message to SpaceX, one of Musk’s companies. When one of its reporters spoke to Musk, he accepted that someone close to him had sent the tip but claimed it was done without his knowledge. Musk declined comment on this and other enquiries. It is understood that he denies any wrongdoing.
