stylistic:tone, linguistic:paraphrasing
Tham Luang cave rescue and defamation case

In July 2018, Musk arranged for his employees to build a mini-submarine to assist the rescue of children trapped in a flooded cavern in Thailand. Richard Stanton, leader of the international rescue diving team, encouraged Musk to facilitate the construction of the vehicle as a backup in case flooding worsened. However, Stanton later concluded that the mini-submarine would not work and said that Musk's involvement "distracted from the rescue effort". Engineers at SpaceX and The Boring Company built the mini-submarine from a Falcon 9 liquid oxygen transfer tube in eight hours and personally delivered it to Thailand. Thai authorities ultimately declined to use the submarine, stating that it wasn't practical for the rescue mission. In March 2019, Musk was one of the 187 people who received various honors conferred by the King of Thailand for involvement in the rescue effort.

Soon after the rescue, Vernon Unsworth, a British recreational caver who had been exploring the cave for the previous six years and played a key advisory role in the operation, criticized the submarine on CNN as amounting to nothing more than a public relations effort with no chance of success, maintaining that Musk "had no conception of what the cave passage was like" and "can stick his submarine where it hurts". Musk asserted on Twitter that the device would have worked and referred to Unsworth as a "pedo guy". He then deleted the tweets, apologized, and deleted his responses to critical tweets from Cher Scarlett, a software engineer, which had caused his followers to harass her. In an email to BuzzFeed News, Musk later called Unsworth a "child rapist" and said that he had married a child.

In September, Unsworth filed a defamation suit seeking $190 million in damages. In his defense, Musk argued that " ' pedo guy' was a common insult used in South Africa when I was growing up... synonymous with 'creepy old man' and is used to insult a person's appearance and demeanor". During the trial Musk apologized to Unsworth again for the tweet. In December 2019, the jury found in favor of Musk and ruled he was not liable.