'Seventeen years after that nice Mr Musk sued me, victory in mine'

‘Seventeen years after that nice Mr Musk sued me, victory in mine’

Jeremy Clarkson has declared that ‘victory is mine’ over Elon Musk, 17 years after the Tesla boss sued him for defamation over a bad review.

Jeremy Clarkson has declared that 'victory is mine' over Elon Musk, 17 years after the Tesla boss sued him for defamation over a bad review. Image: Screenshot

British TV show host and presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, has declared that ‘victory is mine’ over South Africa-born Elon Musk almost two decades after the Tesla boss sued him for defamation over a bad review.

Things haven’t been going well for Tesla lately, as reported by The South African website, with sales of the electric cars plummeting both in the US and around the world, leading Donald Trump to try and drum up support for them.

Since Tesla CEO Musk is deeply embedded within the Trump administration, his products have become tainted by association.

Musk is Trump’s main man, so there are a lot of people who have decided they don’t want anything to do with Tesla.

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‘Unreliable’

According to LADbible, one man who seems to be rather enjoying this situation is Jeremy Clarkson, who explained in a recent column for The Times that he’d been sued by Musk after he gave the Tesla Roadster a bad review on Top Gear back in 2008.

Clarkson explained that he’d found the Roadster ‘unreliable’, with the first model he reviewed conking out after 55 miles with the brakes failing and the second overheating.

Musk clearly did not enjoy the verdict, launching a lawsuit over it.

Clarkson wrote: “I said it was unreliable, which it was; that it was ridiculously expensive, which it was; and that because it weighed more than most moons, it didn’t handle very well. Which it didn’t.

“Musk was very angry about this and sued us for defamation, claiming I had a problem with electrical cars and had written the piece before even setting foot in the car.

“He lost the case, and the appeal, and he’s never really got over it. He still claims I was biased and that we pretended his car had broken down when it hadn’t. Even though it had.

“I should really have sued him back, but I feared he’d call me a paedo, so instead I just waited on the river bank for his body to float past. And now it has.”

Ouch, Jeremy.

‘Fair with my car reviews’

Clarkson said he was ‘was always scrupulously fair with my car reviews’ and was delighting in seeing Musk being ‘pecked to death by the very people who put him on the pedestal in the first place’.

Musk’s lawsuit against the BBC for negative publicity was dismissed in 2013, and when he spoke about the matter to Newsnight that same year, he suggested that Clarkson was not the right person to be reviewing an American electric car.

“I was surprised to learn Top Gear was even on the BBC. Clarkson’s show is more about entertainment that it is about truth,” Musk said back then.

“And I think most people realise that, but not everyone. I’ve actually enjoyed a lot of his shows so it’s not as though I just hate Top Gear or anything.

“He can be very funny and irreverent but he does have a strong bias against electric cars and particularly he seems to hate American. Like, his two pet peeves are American cars and electric cars.

“And we’re an American electric car so we’re in the worst possible situation for someone like Clarkson.”