Elon Musk is currently on trial in Los Angeles where he is being sued for defamation. The Guardian published an article about the trial that briefly summarizes what the case is about:
“Those were the questions at the center of the billionaire’s second day of testimony in the defamation case brought by Vernon Unsworth, a British cave explorer, against the Tesla entrepreneur. Unsworth told the federal court in Los Angeles that Musk’s 15 July 2018 tweet calling him ‘pedo guy’ made him feel ‘humiliated, ashamed, dirty’.”
Ryan Mac, a senior tech reporter for BuzzFeed News, is covering the trial and sharing updates about it via Twitter. According to one of his tweets yesterday, Musk tried to buy the domain name JustBalls.com. Reportedly, Jared Birchall, the head of Musk’s family office, attempted to acquire the domain name via an email negotiation. As I understand it, the acquisition email was sent from a reportedly fictitious person named Jim Brickhouse:
Y’all gonna love this. Defense brings up a march 2018 email from Birchall using the Jim brickhouse name and email when he was trying to buy a web domain for Musk.
The domain Musk wanted to buy was https://t.co/CFfgz8KX5N.
Terms were never agreed and they never bought it.
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) December 4, 2019
Of course, I just went through my email history to see if I have any emails from a Jim Brickhouse, and I could not find any!
Assuming this is accurate, I would be curious to know if the Jim Brickhouse pseudonym was used in prior domain name acquisition attempts or if this was a one-off creation. I looked at DomainIQ, and I do not see any domain names registered to an entity with the Jim Brickhouse name.
It would also be interesting to know the email address that was used. Creating email addresses on free services like Gmail or Hotmail is easy, and it makes it more difficult for domain investors to see who is attempting to buy a domain name. However, if they created an email account on a domain name held by Musk or a related entity, it might be easier to track.
From the looks of it, JustBalls.com was not sold to Musk or an associated entity. The domain name has a default Network Solutions landing page, and according to the DomainTools Whois History tool, the domain name has not changed hands in quite some time.
Owner of JustBalls.com coincidentally, is the guy I bought DX.com from MANY years ago! He is a VERY hard guy to find. I had to track down his daughter in Vietnam (if I remember correctly) and she relayed the message to her dad (who is a super successful and retired entrepreneur who was an ecommerce pioneer in the 90’s). GREAT GUY!
Great story and history thanks.
Sounds like something Richard Branson would own !
Cheers