Introducing...Elon's Spies
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Hello, it's Basha Cummings here. I'm an editor at Tortoise, which is the home of Sweet Bobby, Hoaxed and many more award-winning investigative podcasts. I'm here to tell you about Tortoise Investigates, where we curate the best of our chart-topping investigations in one place. Everything from extraordinary tales of deception to a suspicious killing to one mother's decades-long fight with the police. Just search for Tortoise Investigates wherever you get your podcasts.

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Monday.com, for whatever you run. Go to Monday.com to learn more. 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. 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, 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 tantalising, new information comes to light that drags you back into the world you thought you'd left.

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. 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. Quiet toys. Okay. There you go. Okay, let's try that. 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 Bashar's flat to find out more. 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.

described how he had kind of presented himself as this secret intelligence service type guy, a bit of a James Bond character. Here's the story in a nutshell. Back in 2023, Basher 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. But actually, the truth was something quite different.

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. 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 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 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. 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.

Basher 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 Basher about something else. Something that lingers.

So that's how we got to this part of the story. Okay, so you were looking into this guy, Oliver Lewis, but where does Elon Musk fit into it? So...

Oliver Lewis had told, by this point I was aware of two women he had told a series of really 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. 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 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.

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, Oliver Lewis, this relatively unknown figure in the opaque world of defence 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 name. That changed when the podcast was released.

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 had seen. Which could have or is likely to have exposed some of the same sort of lies that your podcast exposed. That's what I was led to believe, yes.

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 rumour 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. Donald Trump is a bit about his plan for the economy. One of the things that he said he wants to put together is a government efficiency commission to essentially audit the government. And it would be led by Elon Musk.

With the US election pulling into focus, we must contend with the idea that Musk might become even more powerful than he is today. And I would be willing to be part of that commission. He might be in the room in a second Trump administration, helping decide national policy in the most powerful country in the 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 money 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 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.

I'm Alexi Mostras and this is Elon's Spies. Episode 1, Pedo Guy. When was the last time you spoke to the media about this period of your life? 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.

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. Yeah, Vern Unsworth, now MBE. I've worked in financial services since I've been 16, so it's 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.

For a brief window of time, Vernon Unsworth was at the centre of one of the biggest stories in the world. 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, Tick, splitting his time between the UK and Thailand. During the morning of the 24th,

Tick suddenly realised 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 Tam-lo-Wang because there's 13 people missing. Twelve boys, aged between 11 and 16, and their 25-year-old assistant coach. A football team called the Wild Boars.

They go into the Tam Luang cave on June 23rd after a practice session nearby and they don't come out. I just arrived very, very early on the morning of the 24th and really it all started from there. Vern knows the cave system well. He's 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 floodwaters and could still be alive if they fled deeper inside. Vern is convinced that the best chance is to assemble a team of his own, rope in the best cavers. 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 Blanthan. By the 28th of June, the men, all based in the UK, are in Thailand. On the face of it, they don't look like a crack team. 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. The British gave us start to devise a plan. When I met the ministers and told them, you know, 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, you know, look at each other. They didn't say anything. They just sort of looked at each other and nodded. How many of you? 13? Brilliant. On day 10, more than a week after they've gone missing, they find the boys hundreds of metres 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. 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, you know, 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.

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

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. I have to say, I didn't even know who Elon Musk was. The story of the trapped 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 a 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.

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 Vern is asked about it by a CNN reporter, he makes his views on the matter pretty clear.

in a sticky submarine where it hurts. I just had absolutely no chance of working. So I suppose I could have used something else, but, you know, I'm a blunt northerner at the end of the day. Anyway, that's where it all came from. 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.

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. He could have called me anything else other than a paedophile, which was disgraceful, disgusting. 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? Yeah, dared me to sue him. And then, obviously in between time, he'd been in touch with Ryan Mack of BuzzFeed. You know, I'd seen Musk's tweets and I thought this was so odd. You know, this is something he had already...

apologize for why is he going and doing this again? It got him in so much trouble the last time around. Ryan Mack is now at the New York Times covering the tech industry. He's just written a book on Musk's takeover of Twitter. But back in 2018, he was a reporter at BuzzFeed News. And so I think we wrote a short story about it at the time, but I also reached out to him to ask him, you know, why are you doing this again? And he kind of

responds to me being like, you know, you should do your job as a journalist. You should dig deeper, you know, sort of implying that there was more there. I really hadn't had any interaction with him before. You know, 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 Bernie Unsworth, right?

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

I've seen the email that Musk sent Ryan Mack. 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 Vern, information that no one else has. As this was all happening, Vern 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. We went toe-to-toe, Vernon went toe-to-toe with a billionaire bully. Not many people have the courage to do that. 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. 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 absolutely no grounds for it.

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?

Well, Mark always warned me that, you know, 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. 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 apologised and moved on. Not Elon. Once the private investigator got involved, then, you know, things get pretty shitty. 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 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 Birchall, the head of 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 Birchall 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 Birchall 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 Birchall 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 hotels, 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.

He even basically made up a story that I'd been going to Thailand for some 30 odd years, which was absolute crap. James Howard Higgins is actually a fraudster. He was jailed in 2016 after stealing £426,000 from his own company. A huge amount of the information he sent to Elon Musk is completely false.

And Birchall would have known that if he'd done basic due diligence. Not only did Jarrod Birchall 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 Birchall 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 bins 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. He was offered an extra $10,000 if he could dig up shit. Reading Howard Higgins' reports reminds me of the blagging 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 similar acts. At this point I need to remind you James Howard Higgins was a conman, a bluffer

None of what he was saying about Vernon was true. He may never have gone through Vernon's bins. He may never have infiltrated his Facebook. But that's not the point. For me, the real takeaway is that Jared Birchall and Elon Musk believed he would and didn't seem to care. I can create a future that I look forward to. I can get where I was meant to go.

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in other words, blagging, undercover work and bin spinning. Essentially you're talking about the spectrum of unlawful gathering of information. We've seen this in Fleet Street before by the use of private detectives. Again, those were the services which he offered. They were

pretty obviously, self-obviously, unlawful. That's Mark Stevens, the UK lawyer for Vernon. James Howard Higgins' promises reminded him of British newspaper misbehaviour too. And, in Mark's opinion, they may well have crossed the line into illegality. 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 I don't think it shows Gerard 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 opportunity.

kind of behaviour. And Jared Birchall, 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. We approached Jared Birchall 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? It's just kind of absurd and it seems in a lot of ways like a Coen Brothers movie. You know, 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. That's Ryan again. 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. 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. One of my caving colleagues here in Thailand received an email from Orion Investigations. 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 time." Coming up on Elon Spies: "Musk now needs to reveal exactly what surveillance he used on me, which firms and what methods." "Do you think the investigation into Martin Tripp was normal?"

knowing what I know about what they really did. 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 go? It was like, Sally, it's Elon. And I was like, what the hell?

Elon Spies is presented by me, Alexi Mostras. 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.

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. Our planet is home to millions of species, but how many of them have you heard of?

I remember at the time thinking, how is this animal real? Welcome to The Animal Sensemaker, a new podcast series from Tortoise and On The Edge. In each episode, we'll take you into the wild to discover the species that don't tend to get the spotlight. One animal every week to make sense of our natural world. Listen to The Animal Sensemaker wherever you get your podcasts.