Billionaire Elon Musk is seeking to dismiss a request for his deposition in a $1 million defamation suit filed by a 22-year-old man over comments Musk made on X —the mogul’s latest legal hurdle as he comes under fire over a slew of moves on Twitter.
Billionaire X owner Elon Musk is seeking to bar his deposition in a $1 million defamation case.
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Key Takeaways
- Musk on Tuesday filed a motion to dismiss a request for his deposition in a lawsuit filed in October by 22-year-old Benjamin Brody, who claimed Musk incorrectly accused Brody of engaging in a “violent” brawl with a neo-Nazi group at a Portland, Oregon, pride festival last year.
- In a motion filed in Travis County, Texas, District Court, Musk’s team argued the suit stemmed from a single post on X, when the billionaire said it “Looks like” one of the people involved in the brawl was “a college student (who wants to join the govt).”
- Brody was not named in the post and Musk had previously denied any wrongdoing, requesting last month that the case be dismissed.
- Forbes has reached out to Musk’s attorneys at the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan for comment, as well as Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, who had called for Musk to be deposed in the case, citing Musk’s “astonishingly reckless conduct,” arguing Musk “is the only source of direct evidence as to his state of mind when making the statement.”
Forbes Valuation
We estimate Musk’s real-time net worth stands at roughly $196.7 billion, making the founder and CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla and rocket producer SpaceX the world’s second-richest man, behind only LVMH magnate Bernard Arnault, at a comfortable $217 billion.
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Key Background
Musk, who closed his whopping $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October 2022, has come under fire in his 16 months at the helm of the company over his decisions to loosen the site’s content moderation policies and reinstate controversial accounts that had been banned. A group of advertisers led a wave of companies exiting the platform in the months after his purchase.
More recently, the billionaire has been wrapped in multiple lawsuits, including a wrongful death suit stemming from the death of two teenagers in a Tesla Model S car in 2018—an appeals court ruled last month that Musk will not have to testify in that case. Musk and X also faced a $500 million class-action lawsuit last year for allegedly denying severance for employees fired at Twitter (Musk settled the case in September).
In November, Musk filed a suit he dubbed as “thermonuclear” against left-wing media watchdog Media Matters for America, after the group issued a report finding several companies’ advertisements on X appeared next to antisemitic posts on the platform. Musk claimed the report “completely misrepresented the real experience on X, though Media Matters president Angelo Carusone slammed the lawsuit as “frivolous.”
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
