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A Tesla reviewer is suing Elon Musk after Musk said he “nearly killed Tesla employees.”
Randeep Hothi, a graduate student at the University of Michigan and a Tesla shorts merchant who is @skabooshka on Twitter, filed a lawsuit against Musk this month, claiming Musk had maligned him in an email and broke his reputation.
The complaint filed in connection with an email musk sent to Aaron Greenspan, who operates a legal transparency site called PlainSite. In reaction to Greenspan’s questions about Musk’s reporting story opposed to Tesla’s critics and whistleblowers, Musk spoke about Hothi by name, saying he had “actively harassed” and “nearly killed Tesla employees.”
“What an appearance scan when Hothi hit one of our other people may have been a trouble-free death with a 6-inch difference,” Musk wrote, according to the lawsuit.
Screenshots were posted on Twitter, which Hothi said led to an “attack” of harassment accusing him of being “a liar, a murderer, a terrorist and a madman.” Hothi argues in the lawsuit that Musk knew or served to know that his statements would be made public.
Hothi says he has suffered and will suffer a loss of wages and business opportunities as a result of Musk’s statements and unspecified damages.
A Tesla spokesman did not respond to Business Insider’s comment request.
The suit is the most recent progression in an ongoing war between Hothi and Tesla, and is a component of Musk’s years of war against short sellers. Musk publicly despises short sellers, investors looking to profit by betting on Tesla’s stock by throwing itself into value. He has denounced the practice, mocking those who interact in it with genuine shorts, even producing Tesla-branded red satin shorts and selling them in Tesla’s online store.
The unrest between Hothi and Tesla appears to go back at least to 2018, when Hothi took photographs of a tent that was being erected at Tesla’s Fremont facility, which the company used to produce the Model 3. After posting the photos on Twitter, Hothi stated in the lawsuit that Musk and Tesla investigated Hothi and wrote down his plaque number.
In February 2019, Hothi visited Tesla’s sales center at its Fremont plant. According to Hothi’s disguise, it is an “attempt to collect data on Model 3 production”. He claims Tesla identified his license plate and sent a security guard to confront him.
In a third incident two months later, Hothi said he photographed a Tesla vehicle with roof-mounted cameras that are used to capture video and audio for the company’s autopilot feature. Tesla workers recorded the car on Hothi’s plates and informed Musk.
The incidents led Tesla to register an opposing restraining order to Hothi, which claimed That Hothi had hit the security guard with his car at the Tesla plant in Fremont and endangered those driving the Tesla car by “making a dangerously close deviation from the vehicle.” “
The lawsuit also claimed that Hothi had entered Tesla’s assets several times. In 2018, an Arlo transit camera fixed on a power pole was discovered at Tesla’s Fremont plant, which the company discovered was registered as Skabooshka, Hothi’s nickname on Twitter. In early 2019, the company discovered another traffic camera and then observed a user driving a car registered with Hothi’s father collecting the camera, on demand.
But Tesla dropped out of the case last year after a ruling ordered the company to provide evidence to support its claims. Although the company said at the time that it had video and audio evidence to make its accusations, offering them to make a judgment would have subjected Tesla workers to an invasion of their privacy.
The animosity between Hothi and Tesla gave the impression of extinction until Hothi’s defamation lawsuit was filed on August 4. And while the trial is the most recent escalation in the confrontation between him and Tesla, this is rarely the first time Musk has been charged with defamation. .
In 2018, a British diver named Vernon Unsworth sued Musk for a tweet in which Musk called him a “fart,” which Unsworth’s lawyers said he interpreted widely as a pedophilia rate. Unsworth, who helped rescue a Thai football team trapped in a flooded cave, had criticized Musk’s offer of a “mini-submarine” to help with the rescue, calling it a “pr shooting” and telling Musk to simply “hit his submarine where it hurts.” A jury ruled last December that Musk is not to blame for defaming Unsworth.