LOS ANGELES — Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk successfully defended himself in a lawsuit brought by a British cave explorer after a California-based jury found that the billionaire had not defamed the plaintiff by calling him a “pedo guy” on Twitter.

On his way out of the court, the billionaire entrepreneur, who testified earlier this week, said, “My faith in humanity is restored." Vernon Unsworth, the 64-year-old plaintiff, who sat mostly stone-faced through the four-day trial, remained silent as the verdict was read. His legal team had suggested a judgment of $190 million in various damages but in the end could not get the jury to vote in its favor.

The lawsuit stemmed from a series of four tweets that Musk sent in July 2018 that insulted Unsworth, a Brit who had been heavily involved in the rescue of a boys soccer team and their coach from a cave system in Thailand earlier that month. In those tweets, Musk called the man “sus” and a “pedo guy.” This was after Unsworth gave an interview in which he criticized the Tesla CEO's efforts to get involved in the cave rescue by building a submarine tube — which was ultimately never used and never proven to work — to extract the boys.

One juror told BuzzFeed News the decision came down to the notion that a reasonable person could not read Musk's "pedo guy" tweet and determine that it was associated with Unsworth. “The judge laid out five points for defamation as soon as we got to point two, which was about being acquainted [with the defamed person], we decided,” said Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles attorney who served on the jury. “The people that read Musk's tweet wouldn’t have known who he was talking about.”

During the trial, Unsworth and his lawyers, led by attorney Lin Wood, argued that any reasonable person who saw Musk’s words in the news or on Twitter, where the billionaire had around 22 million followers at the time, would have interpreted the words as direct allegations of pedophilia. Musk and his lawyers, led by attorney Alex Spiro, portrayed the tweets as a tit-for-tat response in “an argument between two men” and defended them as insults, not accusations.

Importantly, Spiro and his team also pointed out that the four tweets in question from Musk never mentioned Unsworth by name. During the trial, Musk made it clear, however, that the tweets were about British caver.