Elon Musk responded to a bombshell allegation that he exposed himself to a flight attendant by daring the woman to describe something on his body that has not been made public.
“She won’t be able to do so, because it never happened,” Musk tweeted in reply to a supporter early Friday as he continued to claim that the accusation was a political smear job.
He followed it with another tweet in which he delighted in the fact he could now “use Elongate as scandal name.” “It’s kinda perfect,” he wrote, accompanied by a crying laughing emoji.
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His response came hours after Insider published a report in which a friend of the flight attendant revealed that Musk’s company, SpaceX, paid $250,000 in hush money to the attendant after she complained.
The friend—who provided emails and a legal declaration to Insider—said that the woman was giving Musk a massage in a private cabin in 2016 when he “whipped out his penis.”
“It was erect,” the friend said. “And he started propositioning her, like he touched her thigh and told her he would buy her a horse. And he basically tried to bribe her to perform some sort of sexual favor.”
The friend said the attendant is bound by a non-disclosure agreement as a result of the settlement and could not comment, so the friend decided to come forward about Musk.
The allegation comes at a sensitive time for the world’s wealthiest man, who is in the midst of a controversial, stalled $44 billion buyout of Twitter and is reportedly under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Hours before the Insider report was published, but after the site went to Musk for comment, he tweeted that “political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in the coming months.”
Two hours later, he announced he would no longer support Democrats and would be voting Republican from now on.
Continuing in this vein, after the allegation became public, Musk tweeted that Insider’s source “is a far left activist/actress in LA with a major political axe to grind.”
Neither he nor SpaceX have denied paying the flight attendant $250,000. But on Twitter, Musk maintains he never exposed himself.
“I have a challenge to this liar who claims their friend saw me ‘exposed’ – describe just one thing, anything at all (scars, tattoos, …) that isn’t known by the public,” he wrote.
