Tesla’s Musk Unleashes Another Twitter Tirade

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk has branded as a pedophile one of the divers who rescued a youth soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand.

Musk’s bizarre Twitter comments were posted Sunday morning, then deleted later that day. They came in response to British diver Vern Unsworth’s rudely dismissive comments about Musk’s offer to provide a child-size submarine to extract the children one at a time.

Unsworth opined that Musk’s offer was a PR stunt with “absolutely no chance of working.” Musk responded by calling him a “pedo guy.” Media reports about the successful rescue noted that some of the underwater cave passages were barely wide enough for a person to wriggle through.

Musk says he was only trying to help resolve the crisis. Detractors urge him to stay focused on solving Tesla’s production problems and figuring out how to deliver a profit.

Sunday’s exchange follows a series of odd outbursts from Musk against critics earlier this year. In May, he refused to answer investor questions he deemed “boring” and got into a Twitter spat with billionaire investor Warren Buffett over leadership style, declaring he would resolve the issue by launching his own candy company.

In the same month Musk suggested oil companies and carmakers were conspiring against Tesla, attacked the United Auto Workers union for trying to organize the company’s factory and announced plans to launch a website where people could rate the “core truth” of reports by journalists.