Amber | Elon's Spies Ep3
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ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Welcome to Just a Couple Things. It's your sister, Jessie Wu. You may know me from Wild N' Out, Dish Nation, All Blacks a la Carte, and so many other platforms. Just a Couple Things is a podcast where we're dishing all things pop culture as well as comedic story times. Give my podcast a follow and make sure that you subscribe, subscribe, so you never miss out on an episode.

ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com Hey, it's Alexei here. Thanks for listening to my new series, Elon Spies. I really hope you enjoy the final episode. If you want to hear more of our investigations, you can listen to our previous series right here on Tortoise Investigates.

To hear more from Tortoise's award-winning newsroom, just search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts. You can get early access and ad-free listening to all Tortoise shows by subscribing to Tortoise Plus on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or by downloading the Tortoise app. Tortoise. Last time on Elon's Spies. Musk now needs to reveal exactly what surveillance he used on me, which firms and what methods.

The pedo guy defamation still hangs over me six years later. What was your, were you involved in arranging for a personal investigator to follow Mr. Tripp? Yes. Do you think the investigation into Martin Tripp was normal? It's interesting. I, looking at it now, knowing what I know about what they really did, no, it wasn't normal.

It was nuts. Like, it was one of the craziest periods of my life. It's 8am. The rain is drizzling down, but the view from the balcony is so beautiful it doesn't matter. And the birds chirping away in the background, they don't seem to mind. From where I'm sitting, on my sofa late one night, staring into a computer screen, it looks like another world. And it may as well be.

The Gold Coast of Australia is about as far away from London as you can get. It's also pretty much the last place I expected to find a story about Elon Musk. I'm Sally Coates. I grew up in the country in New South Wales, but moved to the bright lights of the Gold Coast when I was 18 for uni.

Studied journalism. Today, Sally works as a strategist. But in 2017, her job was a little different. A couple of years after I graduated, I got a job at the Gold Coast Bulletin, which is just the local newspaper. The Gold Coast is a small city in eastern Australia, south of Brisbane. It's famous for its many beaches, including Surfer's Paradise. The Bulletin covered a lot of pretty regular beaches.

Local news stories, you know, local crime, local politics, a lot of council stories, you know, just... Yeah, like a proper local newspaper. Yeah, the usual. If you're a local newspaper reporter, whether on the Gold Coast or in Bristol or in Memphis, it's the same sort of work. Local journalism is all about covering the community, planning applications, new restaurant openings, that sort of thing.

Celebrity gossip usually doesn't play a big part, but on the Gold Coast, things are a little different. There's been a bunch of movies filmed there. Now, it's not Hollywood, but the city has a reputation as a location for filming big movies.

Films like Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney and Kong Skull Island. I always think it's a little bit like a mini LA. The crew and actors often stay locally. Like Tom Hiddleston, Michael Fassbender, like Matt Damon. Over the years, there'll be kind of a celebrity cameo on the Gold Coast and everyone goes nuts. Manor from heaven for a local newspaper.

And that's why, when Amber Heard flew into town, Sally knew all about it. So Amber would have arrived around April 2017. Now, you know how I mentioned that sometimes stories have a way of coming back to you? You think you've finished with them, and then something happens to drag you back in. Well, last year, I'd spent months looking into the trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp for a podcast called Who Trolled Amber?,

Great podcast by the way, I really recommend it. To be honest, I didn't expect Amber to cross my path again. But I'd forgotten one thing. A year after divorcing Johnny Depp, she'd started a new relationship. It was when all the Elon Musk/Amber Heard madness started very briefly. When Amber Heard arrived in Australia, she was dating Elon Musk. Sally was in for a surprise too.

She'd thought she'd write a few stories about Amber turning up at parties, getting spotted on the beach, that sort of thing. She didn't know it then, but a few months later, she'd be at the centre of a bizarre mystery. And she'd learn something about Musk that, together with evidence we've uncovered, reveals just how far one of the world's most powerful men might have been willing to go to keep tabs on his partner.

I'm Alexi Mostras, and this is Elon Spies, Episode 3, Amber. In 2017, Amber Heard is about to start filming Aquaman. She's playing the character Mira. Was there paparazzi? Were people kind of interested in the fact that she was around? Yeah, people were interested, but she...

She was pretty out and about. It was kind of awesome. She went out to a nightclub and was in with the rabble. It seemed like she was really enjoying herself. We don't really have a huge paparazzi detail here. When she's not filming, she's spotted in town. There's photos of her at a luxury hotel, at a bar, at a party.

Musk flies over from America, an 18-hour flight, to see her. They're pictured visiting a bird sanctuary together. But when it comes to where Amber's living, no one knows the location. Until August 4th, 2017, when someone blows up her privacy. One day, when Amber was still here, we got an anonymous tip that said essentially...

There's a young football player who's being spotted leaving Amber Heard's rented accommodation. And I'll never forget this. It said, looking like the cat that got the cream. But we were like, where the heck has this come from? Sally's newspaper, the Gold Coast Bulletin, receives a mysterious anonymous message. And so we were like, you know, you get tips, but it's usually like, my neighbour built a fence on my land.

Because like we're still a regional newspaper like this. Now, at every news company I've worked for, there's always been a way for readers, listeners, whoever, to get in touch with journalists if they have a story. To be honest, a lot of these tips are garbage. But occasionally you get a nugget that becomes the start of something bigger. This is a nugget. Just to be clear, what was the message suggesting? The anonymous tip

was suggesting that Amber had a frequent visitor who was a local football player and he was leaving her house looking like the cat that got the cream. And the message revealed her private address? Yes. Yeah, it did. And we didn't have that previously. The message says, is spending many nights a week at Amber Heard's house on the...

and leaving early in the morning looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. Basically, it's a tip that Amber is seeing an Aussie rules football player and that he's been spotted leaving her place on a number of occasions.

Sally says that the message immediately stood out to her because Amber's address was previously secret information. No one knew where she was staying. Whoever sent the tip not only knew that information, but had apparently been at the address in the morning and in the evening and on multiple days too.

If the message was to be believed, they were also close enough to see the look on the face of the footballer as he left the house. So it had to be someone who had eyes on him. And when you first got this message, who did you think may have been behind it? We thought it potentially could have just been a neighbour. It did cross my mind that potentially it could have been him sending it in for a bit of attention.

Sally thinks maybe the footballer has leaked the information to the newspaper himself to boost his own profile, but he strongly denies it. Maybe it's a neighbour, but that doesn't really seem to fit. So Sally and her colleagues get technical. Like, they are anonymous, but you can track the IP address, which we usually wouldn't bother doing because, you know, a tip's a tip. But we were like, where the heck has this come from?

The reporters look into the metadata behind the message. That's the underlying code that can tell you things like where the message was sent from. So we traced the IP address and it quite clearly came up as SpaceX, California. Never underestimate the tenacity of journalists at a local paper. It's quite a twist, isn't it?

Everything points to the message originating from inside one of Elon Musk's own companies. And the experts on IP the newspapers speak to, they agree. So the Gold Coast Bulletin writes up the story. It reports just the facts. The anonymous tip. The tracing to SpaceX. The fact that Musk declines to comment. The paper doesn't really try to answer the question at the centre of my mind.

Which is, if someone at SpaceX was responsible for sending the tip to the newspaper, then they must have placed Amber under surveillance. Because how else could they have got that information without sitting outside her house day after day, night after night? And if that's right, what are the implications of that? But instead, the paper reports the story and then moves on.

Fair enough, local reporters have to write several stories a day. They can't spend months thinking about just one of them. And it stays like this until Sally gets a call out of the blue from Elon. A day after someone from SpaceX sends the anonymous tip to the Gold Coast Bulletin, Amber and Musk announce that their relationship is over.

And then the very next day after it was announced globally that they had split up, I went to a cafe and I was having a meeting just with a totally other source about other stories. And in walk, Amber and Elon side by side, it was kind of mid-morning on a weekday, cafe was pretty empty.

And I just said to the person I was seeing, I was like, I'm really sorry. I could pretend to listen to you, but I'm not listening to you. I have to, like, do this. They are really broken up and now they are here. Now, Elon Musk is not known for taking holidays. In fact, he told his biographer, vacations will kill you. But here he is, back on the Gold Coast, seeing Amber for the second time in four months.

And as a complete coincidence, Sally happens to be in exactly the same cafe. Like any good reporter, she's not going to let a chance like that slip by. They are really broken up and now they are here. And so I went up to them and just said like, hey guys, oh my God, I can't believe you're here. Can I get a photo of you two?

And they both gave each other this, like, awkward look and were like, uh, maybe not. We can take photos of you. And so Amber took a photo of me and Elon, and Elon took a photo of me and Amber, like, separately. Like, clearly in the same backdrop. Sally gets the photos and writes up the story. Elon and Amber's relationship seems to be back on. They run it.

My bosses at the paper very lamely labelled it an intergalactic exclusive. It was on the front page of the Gold Coast Bulletin. I know, first of its kind. But then she panics because she receives an email from Sam Teller at SpaceX. Teller is Musk's chief of staff. He says he wants to connect her to Musk, but he doesn't say what it's about.

Her colleagues joke that it was nice knowing her. She waits anxiously. 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 is calling Sally to tell her that the couple are working on their relationship and he's determined to defend Amber.

He says all relationships have their ups and downs, especially ones in the public eye. Fair enough, but Sally wants to know about the anonymous tip. Was it sent by someone in SpaceX, as the IP address suggested? Musk says that he doesn't know about the message himself and that sometimes other agendas are at work. Sally asks him the obvious question: what other agendas? He said that

there were people acting on his behalf that were trying to look out for him. You mean people working for him? Yeah, yeah. Because it came out of SpaceX. So that was the explanation for that. But he accepted that someone working for him had sent the tip to the paper and Musk confirmed that? Yes, yes.

Musk tells her that he's not going to discipline anyone for sending the tip because, "I don't know exactly which team member it was. People sometimes act on my behalf," he says. "Sometimes with my interests in mind, sometimes not." What Musk is telling her is pretty extraordinary. He's not denying that a member of his team sent the anonymous tip. In fact, he's saying they did, just without his knowledge.

And to me, that comes close to an admission that someone on Musk's team spied on Amber Heard. It makes sense to conclude that someone working on behalf of Elon Musk procured that information and passed it back to him. I can't say for sure, like from my experience, but if you lay out the pieces and, you know, form a logical conclusion...

All signs point to either someone was watching and feeding information back or there was some sort of surveillance. When the call ends, Sally has formed her own opinion about who sent the tip. My personal belief is he definitely sent it. And I think with the, you know, knowing how sort of fast and loose he can be with

When Sally agreed to speak to us, I hadn't realised that she'd had a personal call with Musk.

I thought she was going to help us bring the Gold Coast to life and add some colour to another part of the investigation. Part of the investigation we'd already been working on. A couple of months ago, I got on a call with a source. Someone who suggested that if I was looking into Musk and the way he uses private investigators, I might want to look at what happened on the Gold Coast.

This source told me that Amber Heard was placed under surveillance when she was filming Aquaman between April and October 2017.

The source said that Musk's team, acting through one of his security officers, a guy called Andrew Lanu, contracted with an Australian firm of private investigators who specialised in exposing marital infidelities. The source said that the surveillance on Amber was extensive, that it went on for weeks if not months, at a cost that ran into hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars.

The Australian company is said to have used six or seven operatives to spy on Amber every night, followed her in multiple cars and pretended to be paparazzi if they were caught. They even used infrared cameras and drones. And all because, apparently, Musk wanted to keep an eye, or several eyes, on Amber. He suspected her of being unfaithful.

When I put this to Musk and to Amber, both declined to comment. So did the firm of investigators in question. But taken together with Sally's story, a disturbing picture was beginning to emerge. An insight into how Musk thinks and acts. Musk and Heard's relationship broke down in December 2017.

When he spoke to his biographer Walter Isaacson about this period, Musk described it as one of "unrelenting insanity". It was mind-bogglingly painful, the most concentrated pain I've ever had. And it is noticeable that many of the incidents we've covered in this podcast happened during this timeframe, between 2017 and 2018.

It was a time when Musk was going through months of unrelenting stress. This is what he wrote on Twitter in 2017: "The reality is great highs, terrible lows. What I do is just take the pain." So I'm thinking, is this whole investigation essentially historic? Is the Elon Musk of 2024 a changed man? The Musk of today is more certain of his position, even richer and more powerful.

Would Musk 2.0 have spied on Amber Heard? Or employed a fraudster to dig into Vernon Unsworth? Or set private investigators on Martin Tripp? As we were writing this episode, Musk posted a tweet. It was a picture of Jim from The Office, the US comedy, holding up two boards. "How do you know who's telling the truth?" one board said. The second board gave the answer.

The ones trying to silence other people are the ones lying. If we take Musk's post at face value, he's setting his face against anyone trying to silence another person. Against anyone trying to stem the free flow of information. Except, it could be argued, that's exactly what he's done himself. Not just in 2017 and 2018, but right up until the present day.

I'm Christina Balan. I'm well known worldwide as the stubborn woman engineer who dares to stand up against the almighty Elon Musk. Christina Balan has been fighting with Elon Musk for more than a decade. She used to work as an engineer for Tesla. She was such a star that her initials were engraved on the batteries inside thousands of their electric cars.

But after raising a safety concern about a design flaw, she claims she was pushed out. Kristina won a wrongful dismissal case against Tesla, but was then publicly accused by the company of theft and embezzlement. So she took them to court again. She wanted to clear her name, and she didn't know how long she had to do it. My biggest concern during cancer was, my God,

My little one will always have... Sorry, I'm being emotional. My little one who, for him, I'm the hero, I'm the mommy who designs airplanes and cars. My memory of me for him will be always questioned. Was he or was not a thief at the crime? And even if he knows the truth, even if I have the evidence, I couldn't have a chance...

to show the world how disgusting Elon Musk really is, how disgusting a company like Tesla really is and what a bunch of hypocrites they are to know that they are lying and still not have a heart, not have a decency to say she can die. She's fighting the most aggressive type of cancer. It's time for us to just say, I'm sorry, she didn't do any of those crimes.

Despite battling an aggressive form of cancer, Christina wanted to fight her case in open court. But Musk and Tesla seem determined that that won't happen. Like other Tesla employees, including Karl Hansen and Sean Guthrow, the two security guys from episode 2, Christina has been forced to defend herself against Tesla in private arbitration proceedings.

Proceedings which might never be made public, even if she wins. So what Tesla did a few months later, they went and appealed to have my case public. And the court of appeal told them that they are right. And every single person who ever signed an arbitration agreement, they are bound for life in going to arbitration. So they reversed the decision of the first judge. Yes.

Correct. And so that put you back into this private arbitration? Correct. To me, this is hard to justify. Why should Tesla be allowed to accuse Kristina of a crime in public and then compel her to defend herself behind closed doors? Particularly when Musk, Tesla's boss, publicly states that he's against anyone trying to silence anyone else.

In May 2023, a group of US senators wrote to Musk saying that they were incredibly troubled by Tesla's use of forced arbitration clauses. The politicians accused the company of ignoring "reportedly deplorable and discriminatory conditions" and of using arbitration agreements to limit regulatory authorities' ability to protect Tesla customers and employees.

Far from fighting against those who seek to silence information, in his corporate life at least, Musk continues to do the opposite. By the way, during this period that she was battling Tesla, Christina also alleges that she was subject to surveillance.

A note was even pinned to her door.

I had a very scary note taped on my door in which they said, if you care about your son, you will drop your lawsuit. And sadly, I don't have the evidence of that because my, let's say, my reptilian brain of a mother, when I saw that, I just went and picked it up and ripped it to pieces because my little one was behind me.

I can't say that Musk or his investigators had anything to do with the note. I've spoken to Christina's ex-partner, who remembers her seeing it. It might have been put there by an ardent Tesla fan, of which there are many, or by someone else entirely. Still, it leaves a chill. Hi guys. Hey, how's your day in Parliament? Yes, all good. Just very, very busy as Parliamentary Day is.

happened to be, but less busy than if I was on the front bench having to answer lots of questions. So small mercies. This summer, SpaceX helped make history when four private citizens who had orbited Earth in a SpaceX capsule went on to complete the first all-civilian spacewalk. Another impressive feat for Elon Musk. But earlier this summer, his attention on social media was elsewhere.

After the murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift themed dance class, riots broke out in parts of the UK. Misinformation swirled on social media. Elements of the far right became convinced, incorrectly, that the killer was a Muslim refugee. Musk predicted that civil war would break out in the UK and he criticised the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, saying Britain was turning into the Soviet Union.

He also rekindled an old spat with the former First Minister of Scotland, Hamza Yousaf. How did your relationship, if I can characterise that, with Elon Musk all begin? How did it all start and when? Well, to be honest, I can't say I have a relationship with Elon Musk. I've never met the individual, but we've of course had interactions before.

Back in 2020, Humza made a speech to the Scottish Parliament. At the time, he was Justice Secretary and he told his fellow politicians that Scotland had a clear issue with structural racism. When Elon Musk saw an edited video of that speech, he took to Twitter to brand the politician as a blatant racist. Humza hit back, accusing Musk of racism, something he stands by.

Would you go so far as to say he's racist? I don't doubt for a moment that he absolutely is a racist, has racist sympathies, amplifies racists, believes in white supremacists. Conspiracy theories, I mean, I think we can be little doubt on that given the various interventions he's made over the years. Tension between the pair has bubbled away for years.

but it was during the riots when they boiled over. Hamza called Musk one of the most dangerous men on the planet, prompting Musk to describe the politician as a 'super racist'. But this time, just as he's done in the past, Musk took it a step further.

The tweets that he sent you that really caught my eye included ones that said, I dare that scumbag to sue me. Go ahead, make my day. And then this is the important one. Legal discovery will show that however big a racist he's been in public communications, he is vastly worse in private communications.

It's an attempt to threaten and intimidate me. And let me be clear, Elon Musk could have trillions, let alone billions, and he wouldn't be able to shut me up. I'm going to continue to call out his racist, far right, white supremacist tendencies. But that caught me by surprise and I started to wonder what it was he was doing.

possibly talking about and thought well okay this is somebody who obviously has access to Twitter DMs or ex-DMs by the way that should ring alarm bells for people you know as your those private conversations you have in your DMs how secure are they or will they be used by this multi-millionaire sociopath megalomaniac who is aligned to the far right Musk's tweet about Humza's private communications could be interpreted in a few ways it

It could be purely speculative, but it has a sinister feel to it. But do you suspect that he might have accessed your messages on Twitter?

Oh, I'm certain. Oh, I'm certain he absolutely does. And I'm certain he scours anybody who he scours the private messages of those that he sees as a threat. In fact, I'm certain he has a whole team of people who are now looking at any information that they can gather on me and try to use it to try to besmirch, as I say, my reputation and they'll use any nefarious tactics in order to do that.

You said that in a kind of blasé way that you went back and you looked through your private messages to see if there was anything kind of incriminating. But like, if you look at, I mean, if I look at it, I find it absolutely extraordinary that you felt worried enough to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it was more of...

complete and utter confusion about what the heck he was talking about. Like what's kind of a very pointed accusation that he's trying to make. And most people, you know, who commented underneath it are saying the same thing. Well, you know, go on Elon releases Twitter DMs and I'm thinking, well, what is there? I've been on Twitter for a long time. And, you know, have I made an off-colour joke? Have I said something in a private communication? Yeah.

So I thought I'd better do the belt and brace this thing. And as I say, there was nothing there. And unsurprisingly so. But here is somebody who's basically saying to me, by the way, you know, you better watch out. I'm going to release stuff on you and it's going to make your life hell. Hamza is concerned enough to spend time scrolling through his old messages. Was there anything he could have said that Musk could use against him?

As I was listening to Humza talk about this, I kept thinking, this is not a great look for democracy. Humza was the first minister of Scotland. He was a powerful guy, a democratically elected leader. And yet here he is, searching through his private messages on Twitter, because he's concerned that the platform's owner could gain access to them.

Do you think that his reference to private communications might refer to messages outside Twitter? That's the fear. That is genuinely the fear, is that here is somebody with almost unlimited amounts of wealth. I mean, I saw a report a couple of days ago that he could be the world's first trillionaire in the next few years. And I have no doubt that he would use that wealth to

in the most nefarious ways possible if he thought somebody was a threat or took a dislike to them, as he has to me. And what I noticed when you reached out to me is that there is a pattern of behaviour. Look, I'm very concerned about Elon Musk. I've described him, and I repeat this charge, that he's one of the most dangerous men on the planet. He's unaccountable, one of the wealthiest, by some accounts the wealthiest man

an individual on the planet. He does what he wants, says what he wants, and does not care about the consequences. There is no evidence to suggest that Musk has accessed Humza's messages or any of his other private communications. I asked Musk about this, but he didn't respond to requests for comment. We understand he denies ever accessing private messages on Twitter.

When Walter Isaacson's book on Musk came out last year, it was reviewed by The Guardian. The headline, which still makes me laugh a bit, was "Elon Musk: Pillock, Genius, or Both?" Having spent a few months looking into Musk's life, it's clear to me that the answer is both.

Musk is a man with the geopolitical power to sway wars, to swing public opinion behind one politician or another, to put humans on Mars, to save us from a fossil fuel future. He's a man who can transform reality simply through the force of his own will. It makes me think back to what Jim Cantrell, Musk's old SpaceX buddy, told us:

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. Musk has a force in him that lets him build companies and machines that no one thought possible. That's admirable.

But to me, it's this same force, this same desire to control the world around him, rather than let it control him, that explains why he targets whistleblowers, why he spies on his critics, and why, allegedly, he put his then-partner under surveillance. When I started this investigation, I had three main questions: Does Musk use private investigators in both his public and his private life?

Does that show a pattern of behavior that tells us something about his character? And finally, is there evidence that Musk or people acting for him were willing to push the boundaries when it came to how that information was obtained? Speaking with Vernon, digging through the documents from Martin Tripp's case, and hearing about what happened with Amber Heard, I can say that the answer to these questions is yes.

the thing that lingered from Bashar's investigation last year, it was the start of something bigger. As I write this, we're almost exactly a month out from the US presidential election. A moment of global consequence. But the more I think about it, the importance of this investigation doesn't hinge on whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins.

Musk has grown so big he doesn't need the ear of a president to expand his power and influence over how we all live. His Starlink company gives him control over large swathes of the global internet. More than half the satellites in space belong to him. That alone embeds Musk in the fabric of geopolitics and global communication.

And that's not counting SpaceX and its contracts with NASA. It's not counting Tesla or X or companies like Neuralink. Whether you choose to engage with him or not, Musk is shaping your world and mine. So it matters how he does that, how he controls information, how he seeks to shape his own reality behind the scenes when no one else is looking.

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Here's a show that we recommend. Welcome to Just a Couple Things. It's your sister, Jessie Wu. You may know me from Wild N' Out, Dish Nation, All Blacks a la Carte, and so many other platforms. Just a Couple Things is a podcast where we're dishing all things pop culture as well as comedic story times. Give my podcast a follow and make sure that you subscribe, subscribe so you never miss out on an episode.

Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.