Elon Musk has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought against him by British cave diver Vern Unsworth, arguing his "over-the-top insults" should not be taken as statements of fact.

Lawyers for Mr Musk claimed that Twitter, where he first insulted Mr Unsworth, was a "rough-and-tumble" platform, and that the site was "a social networking website infamous for invective and hyperbole".

"The reasonable reader would not have believed that Musk – without ever having met Unsworth, in the midst of a schoolyard spat on social media, and from 8,000 miles afar – was conveying that he was in possession of private knowledge that Unsworth was sexually attracted to children or engaged with sex acts with children," said court papers first reported by BuzzFeed.

The documents referred to comments made by Mr Musk in July on Twitter, in which he accused Mr Unsworth, who was involved in the rescue of the young Thai football team from a cave, of being a "paedo guy".