Introducing...Elon's Spies

Summary

Introducing...Elon's Spies Sweet Bobby Podcast Episode Released on October 10, 2024 by Tortoise Media

---

Overview

In the premiere episode of Tortoise Media’s investigative series "Elon’s Spies", host Alexei Mostros delves into the shadowy mechanisms through which Elon Musk, one of the world’s most influential and controversial billionaires, employs private investigators to exert control and suppress dissent. This episode unpacks the intricate web of surveillance and defamation Musk orchestrated against Vernon Unsworth, a British cave diver, highlighting the lengths to which Musk will go to protect his reputation and interests.

The Thai Cave Rescue and Initial Encounter

The episode begins by recounting the harrowing events of the 2018 Tham Luang Cave rescue in Thailand, where 13 members of a youth soccer team became trapped. Vernon Unsworth, a seasoned cave diver, played a pivotal role in the successful rescue operation. [19:17]

Notable Quote:

"I didn’t even know who Elon Musk was." – Vernon Unsworth [24:31]

Unsworth’s expertise was instrumental in the rescue, but his involvement inadvertently set the stage for a later confrontation with Musk.

Elon Musk’s Intervention and Failed Submarine

Elon Musk offered to assist by designing a small submarine to aid in the rescue. Despite his enthusiasm, the device proved impractical, leading to criticism from Unsworth.

Notable Quote:

"I bluntly replied, they all die." – Vernon Unsworth [21:00]

Musk’s submarine was deemed ineffective by both experts and Unsworth, straining their professional relationship.

Defamation Campaign: "Pedo Guy" Incident

Following the failed submarine attempt, Musk initiated a defamation campaign against Unsworth, tweeting the derogatory term "pedo guy". This public accusation drastically affected Unsworth’s reputation and led to a legal battle.

Notable Quotes:

"He could have called me anything else other than a pedophile, which was disgraceful, disgusting." – Vernon Unsworth [27:02]

"Betcha a signed dollar. It's true." – Elon Musk [26:22]

Despite Musk’s subsequent apology, his actions left a lasting stain on Unsworth’s personal and professional life.

Legal Battle and Aftermath

Unsworth sued Musk for defamation in the United States, where such cases are notoriously difficult to win. Despite presenting substantial evidence disputing Musk’s claims, Unsworth lost the case, primarily due to Musk’s aggressive legal strategy and the high burden of proof required in American defamation law.

Notable Quote:

"We went toe to toe with a billionaire bully. Not many people have the courage to do that." – Ryan Mac, Former BuzzFeed Reporter [30:05]

The victory by Musk underscored the challenges individuals face when taking on powerful figures in defamation lawsuits.

Investigating Musk’s Use of Private Investigators

The core investigation of the episode reveals how Musk utilized private investigators to gather incriminating information on Unsworth. Musk’s assistant, Jared Burchell, orchestrated surveillance operations through fraudulent investigator James Howard Higgins, leading to the fabrication of false allegations against Unsworth.

Notable Quote:

"Imagine this. You help your little brother land a great job abroad, but when he arrives, the job doesn't exist. Instead, he's trapped in a heavily guarded compound, forced to sit at a computer and scam innocent victims while armed guards stand by with shoot-to-kill orders." – Alexei Mostros [33:00]

The investigation highlights the unethical and potentially illegal methods employed to undermine Unsworth, raising serious concerns about Musk’s accountability and the ethical boundaries of his influence.

Conclusion: The Implications of Musk’s Actions

"Elon’s Spies" concludes by questioning the broader implications of Musk’s actions. It explores how his use of private investigators not only targets personal adversaries but also sets a precedent for the abuse of power among the ultra-wealthy. The episode calls for greater scrutiny and accountability to prevent such tactics from being employed against critics and whistleblowers.

Notable Quote:

"He cannot drop these things. He has to be right, you know, and it doesn't. It's not just that he has to be right. He will make it right." – Vernon Unsworth [42:14]

Unsworth’s reflections underscore the personal toll of Musk’s defamation campaign and the urgent need for systemic changes to protect individuals from such abuses of power.

---

Key Takeaways:

• Elon Musk employs private investigators to surveil and undermine critics.
• The defamation of Vernon Unsworth exemplifies the extreme measures Musk takes to protect his reputation.
• Legal battles against powerful figures are fraught with challenges, often disadvantaging the accused.
• There is a pressing need for accountability and ethical standards in how influential individuals wield their power.

For a deeper exploration of Elon Musk’s use of private detectives and the ramifications of his actions, listen to the full "Elon’s Spies" series available on all major podcast platforms.

Transcript

[Alexei Mostros]

Thank you for listening to Sweet Bobby. This podcast has been on an incredible journey since we released it back in 2021, and since then I've gone on to investigate a whole range of other stories. There's hoaxed about one of the most serious conspiracies in the UK and my search for the people behind it who trolled Amber, which digs into the bot campaign against Amber heard during the celebrity trial of the century, which Johnny Depp and this autumn I released Elon's Spies, all about the private investigators used by one of the most powerful men on the planet, Elon Musk. So if you liked what you heard with Sweet Bobby and you want to try another of my investigative podcasts, just search for Tortoise Investigates. That's Tortoise Investigates. It's the home of all our best investigations all in one place. Get ready for your next True Crime binge.

[Vernon Unsworth]

It's all a blur. My Aunt Ilsa called me and she.

[Alexei Mostros]

Just said get to the hospital.

[Vernon Unsworth]

The doctor came in and told us that there's really not much more that they could do for her and that.

[Alexei Mostros]

We need to go say goodbye. This doesn't happen to people like me. A new True Crime 10 part series from the makers of Sword and Scale launches March 3rd. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And now a next level moment from ATT Business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows and they need to be there in time for International Sleep day.

[Ryan Mac]

You've got AT and T5G so you're.

[Alexei Mostros]

Fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding and International Sleep Day is tomorrow.

[Ryan Mac]

Luckily, AT&T 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you.

[Alexei Mostros]

ATT 5G requires a compatible plan and device coverage not available everywhere. Learn [e-mail] 5G Network. Your customers are scrolling past your social ads, using ad blockers and paying for ad free streaming. But when they're listening to a podcast, they're hearing Acast ads which are 4.4 times more engaging than with display ads. So if you want real attention, start advertising on podcasts with Acast. Start today at go.acast.com ads hello, it's Alexei here. I'm the investigations editor at Tortoise and for the past few months I've been working with my producer Gary Marshall on our latest series. It's called Elon Spies and it's about Elon Musk. Now, I understand if your first thought is what more is there to say about him. You'd have to be living under a rock not to know about the tech billionaire who runs SpaceX, Tesla X and many other companies, or how he's become a hugely powerful and controversial figure. But Gary and I have been investigating a very particular part of his life, one that exists in the shadows, and that's the way he uses private investigators and surveillance to shape the world around him. It's a story that takes us from London to Thailand and ends on the Gold coast of Australia. And it is, I hope, a very real insight into a man who claims to be a free speech absolutist, but appears to behave very differently behind closed doors. You're about to hear episode one of three. To listen to the rest of the series, just search for Elon spies wherever. You're listening to this.

[Basha]

Tortoise.

[Alexei Mostros]

And you want to stay anonymous in this interview, can you tell me why it's important that we protect your identity? I'm standing up against very dangerous and powerful individuals, so it's reasonable to protect my identity. Can you give me an outline of what you want me to look at? The documents showing what kind of services Tesla and Mr. Musk use to go after whistleblowers and private individuals. Just speaking about it makes me anxious. My hands are like rubbing my hands. Sometimes when you finish reporting a story, you feel relieved. You're glad that you've hit publish. After months of work, it's out in the world. It no longer exists, just in your head, and you can move on to the next thing. But occasionally, there's a lingering feeling that the story isn't quite over. Maybe you discover that you've missed something. More sources want to speak to you. Or even more tantalizing new information comes to light that drags you back into the world you thought you'd left.

[Basha]

My home has been invaded by. This is more what my laptop has been used for. This is a picture of my grandparents, which I was going to get framed for them.

[Alexei Mostros]

That's the position my colleague Basha found herself in late last year. She'd published a podcast for Tortoise called Walter's war in November 2023. A week later, she's on maternity leave. And if you can hear her baby in the background, that's because she's still on it.

[Basha]

Quiet toys. Okay, there you go. Okay, let's try that.

[Alexei Mostros]

Walter's War was a great success. You should totally go and listen to it. But there was one aspect of the story that Basha hadn't quite been able to nail down. Something that still lingered. So this summer, me and my producer Gary invaded Basher's flat to find out more.

[Basha]

So last year I was reporting a story about a man who we came to believe was a serial fantasist. I spoke to a couple of women who described being in relationships with this man called Oliver Lewis, who described how he had kind of presented himself as this Secret Intelligence Service type guy, a bit of a James Bond character.

[Alexei Mostros]

Here's the story in a nutshell. Back in 2023, Basha was investigating this man called Oliver Lewis, the guy she believed was a serial fantasist. She had spoken to a former partner of his called Charlie, who had met Oliver online. He told her he was stationed in Afghanistan and was working as a high flying academic with British intelligence.

[Basha]

Led these women to believe that he was from a very rich background, his father had been a lord.

[Alexei Mostros]

But actually the truths was something quite different.

[Basha]

And it turned out that none of this had been true and that he had kind of built this complete fantasy life to these women who had then found out in quite devastating ways that this wasn't true. And then the relationships had ended.

[Alexei Mostros]

Oliver was a serial liar, making up qualifications and experience and telling the same story to multiple partners. The reason this was so concerning was since Oliver's relationship with Charlie had ended, he'd embarked on this glittering career, working his way up through government and the defence industry. And he co founded a company valued at over a billion dollars, a huge.

[Basha]

Company called Rebellion Defence, which was building artificial intelligence for use in military settings. And so that was of interest to us because we thought, well, hang on, if he's not telling the truth, you know, in his private life, is there a case that he's maybe telling these lies in his professional life? And if you look at this company, it also looked like the company wasn't quite what it was saying it was.

[Alexei Mostros]

Right. Rebellion Defence had won contracts with the Pentagon and was promising to revolutionise warfare. So if the guy at the head of it was a serial liar, that mattered. Basha spent months looking into Oliver's life, how fact and fiction was blurred. I won't spoil it for you here, but if you want to know more, you can listen to the series. To use a phrase you've probably heard a hundred times, just search for it wherever you get your podcasts. But I was here to talk to Basha about something else, something that lingers.

[Basha]

So that's how we got to this part of the story.

[Alexei Mostros]

Okay, so you were looking into this guy, Oliver Lewis, but where does Elon Musk fit into it?

[Basha]

So Oliver Lewis had told. By this point, I was aware of two women. He had told a series of really, you know, extreme lies about his background and his professional and educational life before he met them. And so I was looking at other women that he had been in relationships with. And he had been in a relationship with a woman, an actress called Tallulah Riley, who was twice married to Elon Musk. And I had been told a very specific story about why their relationship or how their relationship had come to an end.

[Alexei Mostros]

Tallulah Riley, she's an English actor. In her professional life, she's known for starring in St. Trinian's Pride and Prejudice and the HBO series Westworld. In her personal life, she's more famous for marrying Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs companies like Tesla and. And SpaceX. Tallulah married Musk not once, but twice, first between 2010 and 2012 and then again between 2013 and 2016. But by 2017, she's in a relationship with Oliver Lewis.

[Basha]

And the story I was told was that their relationship came to an end after Elon Musk hired private investigators to check out Oliver Lewis. And in the process of that checking out, it was revealed that he hadn't been truthful, that he had been telling lies that we have come to report, and that relationship ended suddenly.

[Alexei Mostros]

Oliver Lewis, this relatively unknown figure in the opaque world of defense and artificial intelligence, was connected to one of the most powerful men in the world. Basha was intrigued, but at the time, she didn't have quite enough proof to include Musk's. That changed when the podcast was released.

[Basha]

Since we published, another source came forward to say that they had seen a dossier that was pulled together by this private investigator, which was a dossier on Oliver Lewis, which people said that they.

[Alexei Mostros]

Had seen, which could have or is likely to have exposed some of the same sort of lies that your podcast exposed.

[Basha]

That's what I was led to believe, yes.

[Alexei Mostros]

Now, multiple people were telling her about this curious episode. They said that Musk's investigators had compiled what one called a mega file on Oliver and that it was this document which split up his and Tallulah's relationship. I've also seen evidence that Musk himself admitted running a background check on Oliver Lewis. So I think we can now say this did happen, but the details remain sparse. Had Musk decided to do this of his own volition? What techniques did the investigators use to get information on Oliver? Did they stay on the right side of ethical and legal lines? I contacted Oliver and Tallulah about this story. But neither responded to my emails. But maybe the more important question I was asking myself was, so what? Yes, paying private investigators to dig up dirt on your former partner's new boyfriend is pretty weird. But is it really that surprising? I mean, this is Elon Musk that we're talking about. Musk is one of the world's richest men, with access to billions of dollars and a retinue of staff whose sole job it is to support him. Isn't discovering that he uses private investigators about as surprising as discovering that he uses a private chef? And yet, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Maybe it's because I've followed Musk for years, and I was aware that he'd been accused of using similar tactics before. During his takeover of Twitter in 2022, for instance, I'd heard a rumor that he'd threatened to go through the bins of some of the Twitter board members. Then there were the stories coming out of Tesla, Musk's electric car company. Stories like the whistleblower who alleged he'd been followed by private investigators working for Musk. Stories like Musk paying a PR firm to spy on his workers. Social media. And here's the thing. How Musk obtains and uses information really matters.

[Basha]

Donald Trump is a bit about his.

[Alexei Mostros]

Plan for the economy.

[Basha]

One of the things that he said.

[Alexei Mostros]

He wants to put together is a Government Efficiency Commission. Commission to essentially audit the government.

[Ryan Mac]

And it would be led by Elon Musk.

[Alexei Mostros]

With the US Election pulling into focus, we must contend with the idea that Musk might become even more powerful than he is today.

[Vernon Unsworth]

And I would be willing to be part of that commission.

[Alexei Mostros]

He might be in the room in a second Trump administration, helping decide national policy in the most powerful country in the world. World. And even if Trump loses, Musk's influence will remain unique. Most billionaires use their spare cash to buy yachts or private islands, maybe a Monet or two. Musk is the only one to have spent close to $50 billion to buy his favorite social media network. The purchase of Twitter has left him poorer. The platform's value has plummeted by about 70% since he took it over. But it's given Musk personally much more power. He's now got the ability to control the algorithms of one of the most influential platforms on the planet. His critics say he's using this power irresponsibly to ramp up far right discourse and stoke fear and disinformation. And it's not just Twitter. It's SpaceX and Starlink, too. Musk's response to all this criticism is that he's an entrepreneur willing to push the boundaries of human achievement. That on social media he's merely protecting free speech, trying to guard against what he sees as the woke mind virus. At least that's his public stance. So what happens if, in private, the opposite is true? What if, behind closed doors, Musk uses his power and influence to shut down free speech, to track, survey and suppress those around him, both commercially and in his own personal life? This is the question that the Tallulah Riley affair left me with. How does one of the world's richest and most powerful men seek to control his own environment? And just how far is he willing to go? He is somebody who is exceptionally dangerous, but is unaccountable not to tell where Mr. Tripp was. Or was it that you were told not to say that Tesla had private investigators following him? Both. I would.

[Ryan Mac]

I would have to say he's the most brilliant man I've ever met, the most ambitious man I've ever met, and the one person that you don't ever want to fight with or underestimate.

[Alexei Mostros]

I'm Alexi Mostros, and this is Elon's Spies, Episode one. Pedo Guy. When was the last time you spoke to the media about this period of your life?

[Ryan Mac]

I've not spoken to anybody in depth like I am doing now about Musk or the court case or the litigation or really the effect that it had on me at the time.

[Alexei Mostros]

If you're interested in Musk's use of private investigators, it's not hard to decide which case to look at first. Should we just kick off? Can you just start by introducing yourself in any way that you feel comfortable? Name and what you do?

[Ryan Mac]

Yeah. Vern unsworth. Now MBE. I've worked in financial services since I've been 16, so it was 53 years. So I started work with the Halifax on the 16th of August 1971. And in actual fact, my first caving trip was on the 15th of August, 1971. So there we go. The day before, the day before.

[Alexei Mostros]

For a brief window of time, Vernon Unsworth was at the center of one of the biggest stories in the world. Race against time in Thailand to save the young members of a missing soccer team. It's the summer of 2018, and Vernon Unsworth is at home in Chiang Rai in the north of Thailand. He's living there with his partner Tik, splitting his time between the UK and Thailand.

[Ryan Mac]

During the morning of the 24th, Tic suddenly realized she'd missed I think it was around about 20 calls from three different people. And that's when she told me that I have to get to Tham luang because there's 13 people missing, 12 boys.

[Alexei Mostros]

Aged between 11 and 16 and their 25 year old assistant coach, a football team called the Wild Boars. They go into the Tham luang Cave on June 23 after a practice session nearby and they don't come out.

[Ryan Mac]

I just arrived very, very early on the morning of the 24th and really it all started from there.

[Alexei Mostros]

Vern knows the cave system well. He spent a lot of time there. By the time he arrives at the entrance, panic has set in. Thai navy divers are battling strong currents. Deep water and mud blocked passages in the cave complex as they try to find the missing boys. But they've still not made contact with them. News of the event travels around the globe. Now all the attention is on the desperate bid to mount a rescue operation before it's too late. The assumption is that they got cut off by rising flood waters and could still be alive if they fled. Deeper inside, Verne is convinced that the best chances to assemble a team of his own rope in the best cavers.

[Ryan Mac]

And I wrote down on a piece of paper the names of the three people that we needed out here and that was Rob Harper, Rick Stanton and John Blonthen.

[Alexei Mostros]

By 28 June, the men, all based in the UK, are in Thailand. On the face of it, they don't look like a crack team.

[Ryan Mac]

The four of us had had between us over 150 years of caving experience and we'd all been involved in major cave rescues. All that the Navy SEAL command saw was four old guys all dressed in scruffy T shirt and shorts.

[Alexei Mostros]

The British cave us start to devise a plan.

[Ryan Mac]

When I met the ministers and told them, they said to me, what happens if we don't take your advice? And I bluntly replied, they all die. And the room went quiet and I saw the two ministers look at each other. They didn't see anything, they just sort of looked at each other and nodded.

[Alexei Mostros]

How many of you? 13. On day 10, more than a week after they've gone missing, they find the boys hundreds of meters below the surface. A huge relief. But now they have to bring them home and any option for doing that is fraught with risk. Oxygen levels are decreasing, time is running out. And this is where the story becomes truly remarkable. One of the many concerns is that the boys will panic during the long dive out over a kilometre of the route is Fully flooded, a decision is made that it's too risky to take the boys out of the cave system while they're conscious. So the team make a phone call to one of the very few anaesthetists in the world, who is also a cave diver, Dr. Richard Harry Harris from Australia.

[Ryan Mac]

Just the physical side of it, you know, of putting a child to sleep, especially with ketamine, the doses were quite small, so each of the divers were given a lesson in how to administer ketamine if they were starting to wake up. And just generally the whole journey. As Jason said, he was confident of getting the child out, but he wasn't 100% convinced that they were going to come out alive.

[Alexei Mostros]

After a global audience holds its collective breath for 18 days, one by one, the rescue team manages to bring the team out alive. It's the happy ending everyone hoped for.

[Ryan Mac]

Obviously, I was proud to be part of what happened, you know, because I don't think many people gave the boys much chance.

[Alexei Mostros]

Verne's underselling it here. According to the other divers, if it wasn't for him, the boys would be dead. But despite this heroism, for Verne, elation is about to turn into something much darker.

[Ryan Mac]

I have to say, I didn't even know who Elon Musk was.

[Alexei Mostros]

The story of the Trap boys doesn't go unnoticed by Elon Musk. Days into the rescue attempt, he announces that he's pulled together a team of engineers from SpaceX and the boring company to design and build a, quote, tiny kid sized submarine. It's a typical move by the brash billionaire, a consequence of a mindset that says every obstacle is just an engineering problem waiting to be solved. At one point, Musk tweets a video of the submarine being demonstrated. Welcome back.

[Vernon Unsworth]

Let's pull him all the way out.

[Alexei Mostros]

I'm no expert, but it seems ambitious. I mean, even small submarines can't bend round corners. But Musk, he's serious. He flies a team of engineers out to Thailand to drop off this mini sub. But it's soon deemed completely impractical. And when Verne is asked about it by a CNN reporter, he makes his views on the matter pretty clear.

[Ryan Mac]

In Sticky Submarine Where It Hurts. Just had absolutely no chance of working, so I suppose I could, I could have used something else, but, you know, I'm a blunt northerner at the end of the day. Anyway, that's. That's where it all came from.

[Alexei Mostros]

Musk has spoken before about his addiction to Twitter, how he checks the app every morning before he gets up. So it's not surprising that Vernon's comments reach him pretty quickly. Elon Musk is not someone to let an insult lie. In a series of tweets that he later deletes, Musk calls Vernon a pedo guy. Basically, one of the world's richest men accuses a man who's just spent the past three weeks under the spotlight of the world's media trying to pull off an audacious rescue and succeeding a pedophile profile. Musk airs his views to 22 million followers. And when a fellow Twitter user comments on what Musk has said, he doubles down, saying, betcha a signed dollar. It's true.

[Ryan Mac]

He could have called me anything else other than a pedophile, which was disgraceful, disgusting.

[Alexei Mostros]

A few days later, Musk apologises. He's been forced into it by Tesla's board. But a few weeks after that, he posts another tweet implying that the reason Vernon hadn't sued him yet was because the allegations were true. He kind of dared you to sue him?

[Ryan Mac]

Yeah, dared me to sue him. And then obviously, in between time, he'd been in touch with Ryan Mack of buzzfeed.

[Vernon Unsworth]

You know, I had seen Musk's tweets and I thought this was so odd. You know, this is something he had already apologized for. Why is he going and doing this again? It got him in so much trouble the last time around.

[Alexei Mostros]

Ryan Mac is now at the New York Times covering the tech industry. He's just written a book on Musk's takeover of TW, but back in 2018, he was a reporter at BuzzFeed News.

[Vernon Unsworth]

And so I think we wrote a short story about it at the time. But I also reached out to him to ask him, why are you doing this again? And he kind of responds to me being like, you should do your job as a journalist, you should dig deeper, sort of implying that there was more there. I had really hadn't had any interaction with him before. This is some of my first emails with Elon Musk. And I just respond, you know, what do you mean? What evidence is there? You know? And eventually he sends me this kind of long screed about Vernon Unsworth, claiming that he was a, quote, child rapist who had taken a 12 year old bride. And these were very specific accusations. Right? This kind of showed his state of mind, how he still thought that this guy was essentially a pedophile, that Vernon Unsworth did actually commit these acts.

[Alexei Mostros]

I've seen the email that Musk sent Ryan Mac. It contains very specific allegations about Vernon Stuff that goes way beyond Musk's original tweet. Now he sounds like he has new information about Verne, information that no one else has. As this was all happening, Verne teamed up with a London based media lawyer called Mark Stevens. They decided to sue Musk, alleging that Musk embarked on a defamation campaign to destroy Vernon's reputation by publishing false and heinous accusations of criminality. Partly because he brought the case in America, where defamation cases are notoriously hard to win. And partly because Musk hired an exceptionally aggressive lawyer called Alex Spiro, who was able to paint his Twitter comments as just a joke. Musk won the case.

[Ryan Mac]

We went toe to toe. Vernon went toe to toe with a billionaire bully. Not many people have the courage to do that.

[Alexei Mostros]

It was a crushing blow. Vernon was left to deal with the pedo label and it stuck. Whenever I mention Vernon to friends or colleagues, they remember that phrase, the pedo guy. It's dominated his life for years in a way that still upsets him deeply.

[Ryan Mac]

I find it difficult to talk about because I think it's the most disgusting thing that you can call anybody, really. And there was no, there was absolutely no grounds for it.

[Alexei Mostros]

But not many people know the story behind Musk's actions. Why he kept doubling down, why he had the confidence to keep accusing Vernon of crimes he didn't commit. When did you first learn that Elon Musk had employed a private investigator to look into your life?

[Ryan Mac]

Well, Mark always warned me that, you know, that these things could happen. They would do anything to try and. Sorry I have to say this, he said, they will try and dig up shit on you.

[Alexei Mostros]

Back in 2018, Elon Musk was facing a crisis. He'd promised to launch The Tesla Model 3, a cheaper version of his electric car. But wide scale production was delayed. He was working 120 hour weeks sleeping under his desk. Many other billionaires would have seen Vernon Unsworth as a distraction. They'd have apologized and moved on. Not Elon.

[Ryan Mac]

Once the private investigator got involved, then, you know, things get pretty shitty.

[Alexei Mostros]

A few days after Musk fires off his pedo guy tweets, a man called James Howard Higgins sends an email to his office. Howard Higgins tells Musk he's a private investigator who believes Vernon has skeletons in his closet. He offers to dig up dirt on the caver, claiming that there's no smoke without fire. To help convince Musk, Howard Higgins says he's worked for George Soros and Paul Allen, both billionaires with big security staff. Court documents I've obtained explain what Happened next. Howard Higgins email filters up to Sam Teller, Musk's young chief of staff. Sam passes it to Jared Burchell, the head of the Musk's family office. He tells Jared Elon wants us to look at this. While Sam Teller is known to most journalists, Jared is a different matter altogether. Jared Burl likes to operate behind closed doors. He's in charge of Musk's family office. Basically, he looks after his money. In many ways, Jared Burl is Musk's right hand man. Jared decides to take Howard Higgins up on his offer. He creates a fake email address under a fake name to communicate. And for around $50,000, he asks Howard Higgins to put Vernon under surveillance in the UK and in Thailand. Howard Higgins agrees. He signs an NDA and code names their plan Project Rowena. The objective, find something, anything that substantiates Musk's pedo guy allegation. Almost immediately, Howard Higgins begins to feed Burchell information about Vernon. Information that seems to show that he met his partner Tick when she was very young, maybe even as young as 12. Some of the reports make for uncomfortable reading. Howard Higgins says Vernon is a regular in sex hotel, that he's known as a mantha, an older man with an attraction to younger women. Howard Higgins says friends of Vernon have called him creepy, that he spent a lot of time in Pattaya, a center for sex tourism in the country. There's just one big problem.

[Ryan Mac]

He even basically made up a story that I'd been going to Thailand for some 30 odd years, which was absolute crap.

[Alexei Mostros]

James Howard Higgins is actually a fraudster. He was jailed in 2016 after stealing 426,000 pounds from his own company. A huge amount of the information he sent to Elon Musk is completely false. And Burchell would have known that if he'd done basic due diligence. Not only did Jared Birchell fail to check out Howard Higgins background, but he pressed him to get the information against Vernon in any way possible. One email which I've seen shows how Burchill tells Howard Higgins to make sure the team in Thailand keeps digging creatively, extensively, and when possible, aggressively. And Howard Higgins readily agrees. He promises to place Vernon under tight surveillance to go through his Bruins in the UK and Thailand to have an agent infiltrate Vernon's golf club to pretend to be a charity worker in order to get information about the caver. He says he'll infiltrate Vernon's partner's Facebook page and her mother's Facebook page. How? Through deception. By pretending to be someone he's not. Techniques like these are often forbidden by reputable investigations agencies. But Musk's right hand man doesn't try and discourage them. In fact, he does the opposite.

[Ryan Mac]

He was offered an extra $10,000 if he could dig up shit.

[Alexei Mostros]

Reading Howard Higgins Reports reminds me of the blagging and and the hacking that were commonplace in tabloid newspapers in Britain for years, thanks to a public inquiry in 2012 which condemned these practices. Hiring private investigators, going through bins, tricking people into giving you information. Most newspapers have cleaned up their act, and yet here is a billionaire's representative encouraging a private investigator to carry out very serious similar acts. At this point, I need to remind you, James Howard Higgins was a con man. A bluffer. None of what he was saying about Vernon was true. He may never have gone through Vernon spins. He may never have infiltrated his Facebook. But that's not the point for me. The real takeaway is that Jared Birchell and Elon Musk believed he would and didn't seem to care. Imagine this. You help your little brother land a great job abroad, but when he arrives, the job doesn't exist. Instead, he's trapped in a heavily guarded compound, forced to sit at a computer and scam innocent victims while armed guards stand by with shoot to kill orders. Scam Factory, the explosive new true crime podcast from Wondery exposes a multi billion dollar criminal empire operating in plain sight. Told through one family's harrowing account of sleepless nights, desperate phone calls and dangerous rescue attempts, Scam Factory reveals a brutal the only way out is to scam their way out. Follow Scam Factory on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Scam Factory early and ad free right now by joining Wondery. Get ready for your next true crime binge.

[Vernon Unsworth]

It's all a blur. My Aunt Elsa called me and she.

[Alexei Mostros]

Just said, get to the hospital.

[Vernon Unsworth]

The doctor came in and told us that there's really not much more that they could do for her and that.

[Alexei Mostros]

We need to go say goodbye. This doesn't happen to people like me. A new True Crime 10 part series from the makers of Sword and scale launches March 3. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Opinions will always differ.

[Basha]

And so they should, because everyone draws from different influences. Parents, peers, politics, education, media, culture. What you believe depends on who you believe.

[Alexei Mostros]

Financial Times readers know that their opinions.

[Basha]

Are reliable because they're shaped by trusted journalism. Robust opinions, opinions, confident decisions. Source FT to subscribe, go to FT.comSourceFT.

[Alexei Mostros]

Geico makes it easy to get affordable renters insurance in as little as 90 seconds. That way you have more energy for harder things like the laundry. Why is it so difficult to fold clothes? They just end up wrinkly anyway, or on the floor in a pile that just sits there taunting you. But with renters insurance through geico, at least you know that those clothes and the other things you love are covered. Get more with geico. In other words, blagging undercover work and bin spinning.

[Ryan Mac]

Yeah, I mean, essentially you're talking about the spectrum of unlawful gathering of information. And we've seen this in Fleet street before by the use of private detectives. And again, those were the services which he offered. They were pretty obviously self. Obviously unlawful.

[Alexei Mostros]

That's Mark Stevens, the UK lawyer for Vernon James Howard Higgins. Promises reminded him of British newspaper misbehavior, too. And in Mark's opinion, they may well have crossed the line into illegality.

[Ryan Mac]

Yeah, I mean, I think if you commission a person to commit wrongdoing, unlawful gathering of information, or even morally repugnant gathering of information, that's inappropriate. And, you know, I don't think it shows Jared Birchall in a very good light. The fact that you're prepared to descend to those kinds of levels and spend an inordinate amount of money on essentially trying to prove the truth of a tweet, which, you know, was completely untrue, seems to me an exceptional kind of behavior. And Jared Birchell, obviously, as the head of the private office for Elon Musk, his task was to defend the reputation of his boss, apparently at all costs.

[Alexei Mostros]

We approached Jared Birchell and Musk about this, but neither replied to our request for comment. After speaking to Mark, I'm thinking, how did it ever get to this point? What does it say about Musk that he goes to this length to back up a stupid tweet?

[Vernon Unsworth]

It's just kind of absurd. And it seems in a lot of ways like a Coen Brothers movie. You know, it's just. It's just on its face, very ridiculous. You know, I wrote this very long piece as well about, like, the psyche of Elon Musk and why he did this in the first place. Like, why didn't he just drop it? You know, he had so many things going on at the time.

[Alexei Mostros]

That's Ryan again.

[Vernon Unsworth]

And in some ways, it's like, it illustrates a lot about his character. He cannot drop these things. He has to be right, you know, and it doesn't. It's not just that he has to be right. He will make it right. He has a lot of people talk about this reality distortion field around Elon Musk. The ability to, like, have people see things the way he wants to be, see them, to drive them towards these, you know, big end goals that people thought were impossible. And in some ways, he was forcing this idea that this guy, this random guy he had never met was a pedophile because he insulted him online. Like he was pushing people towards that idea and trying to make that true. And he was finding every which way to make that true. And I think that is, you know, if you're kind of psychoanalyzing him, is sort of the reason why he never dropped this and like, continued down this path to where it led to this kind of, you know, disastrous outcome.

[Alexei Mostros]

In the court case, Musk's lawyers tried to portray James Howard Higgins as an anomaly. One rogue private investigator, a fraud claiming to have access to information and tricking a billionaire into handing over money. But then Vernon tells me something that flips that narrative on its head.

[Ryan Mac]

One of my caving colleagues here in Thailand received an email from Orion Investigations.

[Alexei Mostros]

Huh. Yeah, that's interesting. James Howard Higgins wasn't the only investigator digging around for information on Vernon. And just like he isn't an anomaly, Vernon's story isn't either. Oh, okay, okay. It's just, it seems like you were using deception to elicit information during quite an unsettling. Coming up on Elon Spies.

[Ryan Mac]

Musk now needs to reveal exactly what surveillance he used on me, which firms and what methods.

[Alexei Mostros]

Do you think the investigation into Martin Tripp was normal, knowing what I know.

[Ryan Mac]

About what they really did?

[Alexei Mostros]

No, it wasn't normal. Like, the number on my phone is like this like American mobile number. And I was like, hi, how'd you. It was like, sally, it's Elon. And I was like, what the hell? Elon Spies is presented by me, Alexei Mostros. It's co written by me and Gary Marshall, who is also the series producer. Sound design by Tom Kinsella. Podcast artwork is by John Hill. The episode was fact checked by Claudia Williams. The executive producer is Kerry Thomas. Foreign that was episode one of Tortoise's new series, Elon Spies. To listen to the rest, search for Elon Spies wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the feed to make sure you don't miss an episode. You can binge the entire series by subscribing to Tortoise plus on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or by downloading the Tortoise app.

[Basha]

Tortoise.

[Ryan Mac]

Get ready for your next true crime.

[Alexei Mostros]

Binge it's all a blur.

[Vernon Unsworth]

My Aunt Elsa called me and she.

[Alexei Mostros]

Just said, get to the hospital.

[Vernon Unsworth]

The doctor came in and told us that there's really not much more that they could do for her and that.

[Alexei Mostros]

We need to go say goodbye. This doesn't happen to people like me. A new True Crime 10 part series from the makers of Sword and Scale launches March 3rd. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.