Elon Musk claimed on Monday that when he called a British diver “pedo guy” in a tweet last year he didn’t actually intend to brand the man as a pedophile — since he believed the phrase meant something else.

The Tesla CEO made the claim in a court filing that asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to throw out the $75,000 defamation lawsuit by the caver, Vernon Unsworth, and forgo a scheduled Dec. 2 trial.

“By referring to Mr. Unsworth as ‘pedo guy,’ I did not intend to convey any facts or imply that Mr. Unsworth had engaged in acts of pedophilia,” Musk, 48, said in the court documents.

“Pedo guy was a common insult used in South Africa when I was growing up. It is synonymous with ‘creepy old man’ and is used to insult a person’s appearance and demeanor, not accuse a person of pedophilia.”

The court docs also reveal that one of Musk’s aides hired a private investigator for $50,000 to look into Unsworth — before the tech entrepreneur blasted him as a “pedo guy.”

“The investigator reported that Mr. Unsworth was a fixture in Pattaya Beach, Thailand — a locale notorious for prostitution and child trafficking — [and] that he had a taste for young Thai girls,” Musk’s lawyers claim in the filing.

The spat between the two men broke out after Unsworth dismissed the mini-submarine Musk and his SpaceX employees built to help rescue the team of young Thai soccer players trapped in an underground cave.

In a CNN interview, Unsworth said the sub, which he blasted as a “PR Stunt” wasn’t used in the rescue and that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurt.”

The Paypal co-founder, in response, sent the infamous July 15, 2018 tweet calling Unsworth “pedo guy.”

Then, allegedly based on the gumshoe’s report, Musk said he sent an August 30, 2018 email to a BuzzFeed News reporter “off the record” telling him to “stop defending child rapists.”

“Mr. Unsworth cannot establish a defamation case just because Mr. Musk insulted him on Twitter and sent a private email to a reporter,” Musk’s attorneys argued in the filing. “The Constitution does not allow that.”

They also asked a judge to treat Unsworth a “public figure” in the case, so that he must meet a higher level of proof that Musk either knew his statements were false or was reckless when he made them.

A judge in April rejected Musk’s request to dismiss the case.