One of the cavers, who was part of the rescue team that pulled out 12 boys from a cave in Thailand is considering taking legal action against Tesla boss Elon Musk after the entrepreneur called him a ‘pedo’ on social media.
Pedo is short for paedophile.
Musk had launched the Twitter rant against Briton Vernon Unsworth after the cave expert slammed his offer of a miniature submarine to extract the footballers from the Tham Luang cave as a "PR stunt".
Last week, a group of 12 football players and their coach were rescued by an international team of divers through a narrow network of twisting, flooded tunnels.
According to Unsworth, who provided mapping knowledge of the cave to rescuers, said Musk's prototype would have had ‘absolutely no chance of working’. “He can stick the submarine where it hurts,” Unsworth had said in an interview.
Musk responded Sunday in a bizarre series of tweets referring to Unsworth, without using his name, as "pedo guy". The tweets, however, were deleted later.
The entrepreneur doubled down on his claim, tweeting from his official account to more than 22 million followers: "Bet ya a signed dollar it's true," news agency AFP reported.
Unsworth told AFP on Monday he had not reviewed the tweets in full and had only heard about them. But asked if he would take legal action against Musk over the allegation, Unsworth said: "If it's what I think it is yes."
The caver said he would make a decision when he flies back to the UK this week, but added that the episode with Musk "ain't finished".
Unsworth, who lives part of the year in Thailand, took part in the gargantuan 18-day effort to retrieve the 12 boys and their coach, a mission that ended on July 10 when the last five members were extracted.
The boys are all in good health and expected to be released from the hospital Thursday.
Musk had earlier proposed using "a tiny, kid-size submarine" featuring technology from his space exploration firm to evacuate the boys, and travelled to Thailand with a prototype last Tuesday.
Musk's tweets attacking Unsworth prompted condemnation from those who took part in the mission to save the boys.
Claus Rasmussen, a Danish national and instructor at Blue Label diving in Phuket, called the allegations "inappropriate" and praised Unsworth's role in the rescue.
"He was one of the driving forces in getting everything done and clarifying for us divers what was going on," he told AFP.
Musk had earlier triggered controversy after tweeting that the Thai rescue chief, who had declined the submarine prototype offer, was not really in charge of the operation.
"He's just a PR stunt merchant -- that's all he is," Unsworth said.
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