Elon Musk’s 7 biggest Twitter spats, with Jeff Bezos, Azealia Banks, Pablo Escobar’s brother, the US government and more

Elon Musk has a combative streak.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is famously unpredictable as chief executives go, a personality trait which has sometimes landed him in trouble – particularly with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

But Musk’s combative side does not just express itself in skirmishes with government agencies. The Tesla billionaire has ended up in bizarre spats with a strange array of people – from fellow billionaires to artists to rescue divers – and often via his preferred medium of Twitter.

The twists and turns in the stories of Musk’s various battles are no less baffling, and it can be hard to remember all the different ways Musk has squared up to various public figures and regular citizens.

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So, we’ve catalogued his weirdest fights.

1. When he called a complete stranger “pedo guy”

Vernon Unsworth is the British diver who took part in the rescue of 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave system in June 2018. It was a difficult, complex operation and the boys were successfully rescued after being trapped for 17 days by international divers and Thai Navy Seals. Unsworth, an experienced cave explorer, was asked by Thai officials to aid in the rescue.

He had never met Elon Musk, but would go on to spend most of 2019 locked in a legal battle with the Tesla billionaire.

Musk had inserted himself into the Thai rescue operation and offered to build a mini-submarine to fetch the boys. The idea never materialised.

Unsworth was asked about Musk’s submarine in an interview with CNN, and described it in unflattering terms, describing it as a public relations stunt. He added that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts”.

That angered Musk, who subsequently wrote a post on Twitter calling Unsworth a “pedo guy”. When a Twitter user challenged him over it, he replied “bet ya a signed dollar it’s true”.

His remarks immediately triggered headlines around the world, despite the fact he provided no proof for the “pedo” claim.

Musk doubled down on the allegation by emailing BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac and calling Vernon Unsworth a “child rapist”, with no evidence.

Censured by critics for using the slur, Musk deleted his tweet and apologised, but he didn’t leave it there. A month later he responded to a Twitter user who criticised him. “You don’t think it’s strange he hasn't sued me? He was offered free legal services,” Musk tweeted, referring to Unsworth.

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Then in September 2018, he doubled down. BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac emailed Musk asking for comment on a legal threat made by Unsworth's lawyer. Musk replied, suggesting Unsworth was a “child rapist” and “I hope he sues me”.

Musk prefaced the email to Mac with “off the record”, but the journalist had never agreed to go off the record and published the entire exchange. Documents later revealed Musk called himself an “idiot” for sending the email to Mac in the first place.

A few weeks after Mac’s article was published, Unsworth sued Musk for defamation.

Musk is now embroiled in a long-running court battle with Unsworth for his defamatory remarks. Court filings revealed Musk hired a detective to investigate Unsworth – but the private investigator turned out to be a con man.

Musk and Unsworth have now been locked in a legal fight for more than a year.

The case has thrown up some bizarre findings.

Court filings revealed Musk paid a man named James Higgins-Howard US$50,000 to investigate Unsworth and relay reports to Musk’s family office.

Higgins-Howard emailed Musk out of the blue following the initial “pedo guy” tweet to offer his services as a private detective. “You may want to dig deep into Mr Unsworth[’s] past to prepare for his defamation claim,” Higgins-Howard wrote, adding “no smoke without fire!”

Higgins-Howard didn't find any evidence, however, and BuzzFeed's Ryan Mac later reported that the would-be private investigator had previously been convicted of fraud. Musk admitted in a deposition that he later realised Higgins-Howard was “just taking us for a ride”.

In depositions Musk has also argued that by calling Unsworth “pedo guy” he wasn't literally accusing him of being a paedophile because the term was used to be synonymous with “creepy old man” when he was growing up in South Africa. He also said he was genuinely worried Unsworth could be “another Jeffrey Epstein”.

The defamation case is still ongoing and the trial is due to take place in December.

2. When he took a liking to farting unicorn art, but didn't pay for it

June 2018 saw Musk lock horns with another unlikely member of the public.

Colorado-based potter Tom Edwards caught Musk’s attention with a mug. The mug carried a painting of a unicorn farting rainbows to power an electric car. Musk tweeted a picture of a mug in February 2017 calling it “maybe my favourite mug ever”.

Two months later friends of Edwards’ told him they had seen the same farting unicorn image used as an icon on Tesla screens, and the image was later used on Tesla’s company Christmas cards.

The Christmas card spurred Edwards into action. “I decided to make it my New Year’s resolution to pursue getting compensation, because artists are always seeing their work just taken, and it happens all the time,” he told Business Insider in June 2018.

In later-deleted tweets Musk attacked Edwards, saying taking legal action would be “kinda lame”.

“If anything, this attention increased his mug sales,” he said. Musk also claimed (in subsequently-deleted tweets) to have offered to pay for the work twice. Edwards said he had had no contact from Musk or Tesla at that point.

Despite Musk’s protestations, the two eventually settled.

A month after the farting unicorn argument erupted on Twitter, Musk and Edwards came to a settlement. The terms of the settlement were not made public, but Edwards posted on his blog that it “resolves our issues in a way that everyone feels good about”.

“It's clear there were some misunderstandings that led to this escalating, but I'm just glad that everything has been cleared up,” he added.

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Musk for his part tweeted a link to the blog accompanied by three emojis: a unicorn, a gust of wind and a peace symbol.

3. When Azealia Banks waded into Tesla's regulatory troubles

On August 7, 2018 Elon Musk sent his infamous “funding secured” tweet, in which he claimed to be taking Tesla private at US$420 a share.

Tesla did not go private, and Musk landed himself with a US$20 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the tweet. He lost his position as chairman of Tesla’s board, leading to long-running bad blood with the agency.

And it triggered another unlikely feud; this time with rapper Azealia Banks.

A week after Musk sent his fateful tweet, Banks wrote on her Instagram that she had been at Musk’s house at the time he had sent it. She had visited to collaborate with Musk’s partner, the musical artist Grimes (real name Claire Boucher), and claimed she had been annoyed when the crisis caused by “funding secured” had dominated Grimes’ time.

“I waited around all weekend while Grimes coddled her boyfriend,” Banks wrote, and compared the weekend to the horror film Get Out.

“I saw him in the kitchen tucking his tail in between his legs scrounging for investors to cover his ass after that tweet,” Banks told Business Insider at the time.

Banks accused Musk of taking her phone.

On August 20, 2018, Banks was back on Instagram, tagging Elon Musk.

Banks posted: “@elonmusk you need to contact me. ASAP”, and “I need my phone back now. @elonmusk”, on her Instagram story. She later deleted the posts.

Banks then shared a screenshot with Business Insider that appeared to show a text from Grimes saying the choice of share price (US$420) was a marijuana reference. “He just got into weed cuz of me and he’s super entertained by 420, so when he decided to take the stock private he calculated it was worth 419$ so he rounded up to 420 for a laugh and now the [SEC] is investigating him for fraud”, the text read.

Musk told The New York Times he rounded up the price because US$420 had better “karma” than US$419, and denied using marijuana.

Musk, usually combative, didn’t really respond publicly to Banks except to say he had never met her.

Musk told Gizmodo that he hadn’t met Banks “or communicated with her in any way”, but confirmed to The New York Times he had seen her at his house.

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“I saw her on Friday morning, for two seconds at about a 30-foot distance as she was leaving the house … I’d just finished working out. She was not within hearing range. I didn't even realise who it was. That is literally the only time I've ever laid eyes on her,” he told the Times.

The Banks-Musk feud dragged on for months after the story blew up.

Banks lashed out at Musk in January of this year after Musk’s lawyer said Banks had a “history of making bold and sometimes unverified claims”.

“They are still slighting me like I don’t have plenty more dirt to spill on Elon,” she wrote on Instagram – later deleting the post. “This is going to get extremely ugly … Elon will learn very soon who is more powerful of us two.”

In January, a court granted a motion to subpoena Banks, Grimes and publications including Business Insider.

4. When he was accused of stealing an idea from Pablo Escobar's brother

Musk ended up in a spat with Roberto Escobar, brother of deceased Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, over an accusation of intellectual property theft.

TMZ first reported that Escobar had accused Musk of stealing his idea for a flame-thrower when Musk’s venture The Boring Company announced its “Not-A-Flamethrower” flame-thrower in January 2018, beating Escobar's own flame-thrower to market.

Escobar claimed to TMZ that one of Musk’s engineers had stolen the idea while visiting an Escobar family compound in 2017.

“It's not a flame-thrower, Mr. Escobar.”

Elon Musk responded to the story in classic Muskian style – on Twitter.

Musk tweeted a link to the TMZ story accompanied by the words, “It’s not a Flame-thrower, Mr. Escobar”, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the device’s name.

In a follow-up tweet he added he stole the idea from the comedy film “Spaceballs”.

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6. When he traded jibes with Jeff Bezos about which parts of space to conquer

Jeff Bezos owns a space exploration company called Blue Origin, a rival to Musk’s own space exploration company SpaceX.

Bezos and Musk have sporadically interacted about their companies’ successes, sometimes applauding each other, but more often locking antlers.

When Blue Origin unveiled its new lunar lander Blue Moon in May 2019, Bezos reportedly took a swipe at SpaceX’s plans to colonise Mars during his presentation, saying the moon was a much more realistic prospect. According to Bloomberg, Bezos showed a slide with a picture of Mars accompanied by the labels “Round-trip on the order of years” and “No real-time communication”.

Musk responded by mocking the lander’s name.

“Competition is good. Results in a better outcome for all … But putting the word ‘Blue’ on a ball is questionable branding,” Musk said in a pair of tweets.

Musk also called Bezos a “copycat” over his plan to launch thousands of satellites.

In April 2019 Amazon announced its plan to launch 3,236 satellites with the aim of providing broadband to communities without high-speed internet, nicknamed Project Kuiper.

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The project bears some resemblance to a SpaceX project called Starlink, which won FCC approval in November 2018 to launch almost 12,000 satellites into orbit. CNBC also reported that Amazon hired a former SpaceX executive to head up Kuiper.

After news of Project Kuiper broke, Musk tagged Bezos and tweeted the word “copy” followed by a cat emoji.

7. David Einhorn, the billionaire short seller Musk loves sending short shorts to

Musk has a pretty well-documented hatred for short sellers, once tweeting “what they do should be illegal”.

One short seller in particular has drawn Musk’s ire. David Einhorn is president of Greenlight Capital and is typically pretty scathing in his notes about Tesla and Musk.

When Einhorn blamed Tesla’s good performance in the first half of 2018 for denting Greenlight’s hedge fund, Elon Musk promised to send him a box of “short shorts” – and he followed through.

In November 2019 Musk renewed the offer of short shorts after Einhorn published a damning note on Tesla’s third quarter results, drawing attention to a shareholder’s lawsuit against Tesla which alleges Musk acquired his cousin’s company SolarCity at an inflated value to bail it out.

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Musk posted an incredibly sarcastic note on Twitter following Einhorn’s letter, addressing him as “Mr. Unicorn”. Einhorn is German for unicorn.

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This article originally appeared on Business Insider.