Elon Musk has agreed to settle in a three-year-old defamation lawsuit brought against him by an outspoken critic of Tesla. The billionaire will pay out $US10,000 (around $14,000) to Randeep Hothi, concluding the drawn out court proceedings, according to multiple reports and a tweet from the plaintiff posted Monday.
The settlement comes about a year after Musk said Tesla would “never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose,” in a tweet thread aiming to attract lawyers to Tesla’s “hardcore litigation department.”
My commitment:
– We will never seek victory in a just case against us, even if we will probably win.
– We will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2022
Yet settle Musk did. In March, the billionaire agreed to resolve the defamation proceedings out of court, according to a press release from the plaintiff’s legal team.
$US10,000 is chump change to Musk — specifically equal to about 0.0000057% of his net worth — and less than one seventh of a year’s earnings for most U.S. households. But for Hothi, the victory seems to be much more about the principle of the thing than the material reality. He has celebrated the settlement as an exonerating success in multiple public statements.
“I brought this case to defend my work, clear my name, and send a message,” he said in his law firm’s press release. “This case was about taking a stand, not seeking fame or money. I feel vindicated.” On Twitter, Hothi repeated that sentiment multiple times over — adding barbs against Musk. “I am pleased to see that the world is now recognising that he is a charlatan,” he posted.
The now concluded legal proceedings revolved around 2019 comments from Musk in which the Tesla CEO claimed that Hothi had harassed and tried to kill Tesla employees. The plaintiff denied the veracity of those statements, claimed they were defamatory, and said that he suffered extensively from a resulting online hate campaign. Seemingly, Tesla was unable to prove Hothi wrong.
Hothi, a graduate student, is a well-known figure among both Tesla and Musk detractors, as well as the billionaire’s sycophants. He attracted a sizable Twitter following in the lead-up to Tesla’s production of its Model 3 car under the name “Skabooshka,” by collecting drone footage and other images from the company’s Fremont, California factory. The grad student was on a mission to disprove Tesla’s claims about high-tech, automated production of its Model 3, ended up being untrue — like many of Musk’s statements.
Hothi became something of a folk hero among Tesla short-sellers, while attracting significant attention and ire from Musk himself. The CEO instructed Tesla guards to kick the “independent investigator” out if they ever saw Hothi or his vehicle near the factory.
In 2019, Tesla tried to get Hothi arrested and later attempted to get a court to issue a restraining order against the grad student, following two separate incidents. In one, the company claimed that Hothi had injured a Tesla guard with his vehicle in an alleged hit-and-run at a publicly accessible Tesla showroom lot adjacent to the Fremont manufacturing facility. However, Tesla dropped the case after law enforcement reportedly told the company that a security camera recording showed no evidence of a hit and run, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In the second incident, Tesla claimed that Hothi had stalked and harassed a Tesla driver away from Tesla property. But the company dropped the case after the judge ordered Tesla to release footage of the event, captured by the car’s camera.
In the aftermath of both defunct legal efforts against the grad student, Musk wrote an email claiming that Hothi was “actively harassing” and had “almost killed” Tesla employees. The email’s recipient, Aaron Greenspan is another longtime Tesla critic and owner of the legal search engine PlainSite. Greenspan published Musk’s email publicly, and that became the basis for Hothi’s defamation case.
This is not the first widely publicised such case against Musk — who is known to run his mouth online and off, exaggerate, and espouse untruths. Previously the billionaire was sued by one of the cave divers who helped to rescue a trapped Thai soccer team. Musk referred to the diver, Vernon Unsworth, as a “pedo guy” in a series of 2018 tweets. The world’s second richest man ended up winning that case, meaning you can legally call Elon Musk all manner of creative things — in public and private. You just can’t make up a story about him trying to hit you with his Tesla.