Elon Musk’s Deposition in Defamation Case From Jewish Man He Falsely Labeled a Nazi Released in FULL — With Stunning Revelations

Elon Musk had to sit for a deposition in March in a defamation lawsuit filed by a Jewish man he accused of being involved in a neo-Nazi brawl, and he fought hard to keep the deposition private. Unfortunately for Musk, he lost that legal battle and the entire transcript has been released, as reported by The Huffington Post.

The dispute arose from tweets Musk wrote in June 2023 that amplified an online conspiracy theory accusing a 22-year-old California man named Ben Brody of not only participating in a brawl in Oregon City, Oregon between the Rose City Nationalists, a neo-Nazi group, and the Proud Boys, but also of being an undercover federal agent participating in the brawl as part of a false flag operation.

Several of the neofascist brawlers were caught on camera with their masks off, leading to the inaccurate identification of Brody as one of them. His name and personal information quickly spread online, with conspiracy theorists digging up social media posts from Brody’s fraternity where it was said that he was majoring in political science and “plans to work for the government” after graduation.

The accusation was farfetched on its face, and all the more so when Brody pointed out he was not only Jewish and therefore unlikely to find common ground among neo-Nazis, he was in an entirely different state, hundreds of miles away, when the brawl took place. But online conspiracies are tough fires to extinguish — especially when the Chief Twit promotes them to his (at the time) nearly 150 million followers.

Among the tweets and replies Musk wrote about the incident, one remarked that it “[l]ooks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt)…but nonetheless a probably false flag situation.” This tweet is still up and has not been deleted; multiple Community Notes have been proposed but somehow none were ever approved to be made public.

In his lawsuit, Brody is seeking more than $1 million for damages, saying that he and his family had to flee their home because of the threats and harassment Musk’s tweet directed his way. He’s also concerned about the impact these online accusations could have on his future job searches.

It’s well-established at this point that Musk has a track record of tweeting, quote tweeting, and replying to accounts with questionable posts ranging from unfounded accusations to straight up anti-Semitism, directing what Claire Berlinski termed a “human tidal wave of attention” to the “loathsome radical losers” who post this hateful content.

Musk has often sought to defend his posts under the banner of free speech (while lashing out at those who dare criticize him or his platform), and he takes a similar tactic in this deposition led by Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, who previously represented some of the Sandy Hook parents who successfully sued Alex Jones for defamation. Representing Musk for this deposition was Alex Spiro.

The roughly two-hour deposition, which took place March 27 over Zoom, was contentious from the start, with Spiro accusing Bankston of filing “these silly, frivolous shake-down cases” and Musk showing “little understanding” of the lawsuit against him, as HuffPo characterized his testimony. (Bankston fired back at Spiro that it was “not proper” for a lawyer to “just start making random statements about the alleged frivolity of a case to another lawyer in a deposition,” among other retorts.)

Below is a selection of some of the noteworthy excerpts from the deposition.

Musk had a burner Twitter account where he role-played as his toddler son

This tidbit was nutty enough that HuffPo wrote a separate article about it. The account in question, @ErmnMusk, is named “Elon Test” and shows a photo of Musk’s young son. According to Bankston, the account was deleted in February, the same day a court order regarding discovery was issued, but it is once again active and posting tweets. It’s not entirely clear if Musk himself is doing the posting, but the tweets seem to be mostly memes promoting Tesla and his other businesses and dunking on his rival social media platforms.

The previous @ErmnMusk tweets were deleted and the oldest one currently public is from March 27, the day of his deposition.

At the deposition, Musk was shown an exhibit with older tweets from this account and asked about it. He claimed it was a “test account” that he “briefly used.” Among the tweets are comments talking about nightclubs and looking forward to turning 3 years old on an upcoming day that did coincide with the third birthday of X Æ A-12, Musk’s son with Grimes.

Musk admits he does not do much fact-checking

Musk was grilled about what steps he took to verify the accusations that Brody was at the neo-Nazi brawl before tweeting about it, and wasn’t able to come up with much, other than tagging @CommunityNotes in what he portrayed as a show of “good faith” (note again, Community Notes never did actually make public any corrective notes on this tweet).

Bankston: We’re going to talk about those tweets, but first I want to verify: You were ordered to answer some discovery, and it appears from your answers that before your tweet on June 27th, you did not do any searches on Twitter or any web searches like on a search engine for information about the identity of this unmasked brawler; is that correct?

Musk: That’s correct.

Bankston: Okay. Would it be fair for me to say that other than the tweets that you interacted with, you did not secure other information about this unmasked brawler?

Musk: I don’t recall securing other information.

Bankston: In other words, you didn’t get any information by text or email or any other sort of communication with anybody else about the brawler?

Musk: I don’t recall. Not that I — not that I recall, no.

Bankston: Okay. And did you ask anybody to go get you — let me start that again. Did you ask anyone to go get you any information on this unmasked brawler?

Musk: No.

Bankston: Okay. So it’d be fair to say that the information that you acquired about the brawler was from the tweets that you interacted with?

Musk: Correct.

Bankston dug into the impact Musk’s tweets and replies can have, due to his massive audience, in response to Musk saying he had only written his tweets about Brody as replies, so they had a smaller audience:

Bankston: You do understand that the amount of people who saw this, who have viewed this, is equivalent to all 30 major league baseball stadiums filled to capacity? You wouldn’t dispute that? I mean, we’re talking over a million people.

Spiro: Objection to form.

Musk: Yeah, that’s actually – that may seem like a large number, but it is not compared to the fact – I believe there are something on the order of five to eight trillion views per year so a million is really –

B: Not a big deal?

M: – hit or miss, yeah.

B: Not a big deal that this went out to that many people?

M: Correct.

He acknowledges he has financially harmed Twitter with his posts

Musk infamously paid $44 billion for Twitter after being unable to get out of his contract, and has since made many controversial decisions, including changing the verification system and rebranding the platform as “X.” Bankston asked him about his posts, and how they might be harming the company.

Musk’s reply:

I believe my posting has really remained unchanged before and after the acquisition. The — and going back to the sort of self-inflected wounds…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 what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public.

Read the full deposition transcript below, via HuffPost:

Elon Musk Deposed In Lawsui… by Sebastian M

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