Stefania Sarrubba
Elon Musk once gave his brutally honest opinion on Jeremy Clarkson following the motor journalist's brutal Tesla review on Top Gear.
Clarkson, who used to host the BBC motoring show with James May and Richard Hammond, slammed one of the earlier models of Musk's electric cars in a 2008 episode.
Back then, the motoring programme aired two road tests, with the first Tesla dying after 55 miles and having failed brakes, and the second overheating.
At the time, Clarkson seemed shocked to learn the model in question, the Tesla Roadster, could be purchased for the eye-watering sum of £92,000 - though he acknowledged that Musk's company could've improved the reliability of the electric car as they mass produced them.
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The Tesla takedown was recently revisited by Top Gear host Chris Harris, who more recently presented the show with Paddy McGuinness and Freddie Flintoff before it was 'rested' for the foreseeable following Flintoff's horror crash.
Appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Harris agreed with Rogan, saying that the show's producers would purposely 'reverse engineer an outcome' for presenters to carry out.
Speaking out after Harris' comments, Clarkson rejected accusations that his Tesla test was fabricated.
"But then talk turned to the story that I wrote a road test of the first ever Tesla before I’d driven it. And that the breakdown we showed on television was fabricated," Clarkson wrote in his column for The Sun.
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"Joe and Chris perpetuate the myth that my Tesla road test was unfair. On Top Gear we c*cked about and upset a lot of people over the years. But our road tests were always scrupulously fair."
As for Musk, he filed a lawsuit against the BBC for negative publicity, but saw his case dismissed by a UK appeal court in 2013.
And speaking about the incident in 2013, while Musk said he was 'a great fan' of the BBC, he had some strong words about Clarkson.
"I was surprised to learn Top Gear was even on the BBC," he said on Newsnight.
"Clarkson's show is more about entertainment that it is about truth," he then said about the host-turned-farmer. "And I think most people realise that, but not everyone."
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Musk continued: "I've actually enjoyed a lot of his shows so it’s not as though I just hate Top Gear or anything. He can be very funny and irreverent but he does have a strong bias against electric cars and particularly he seems to hate American [cars].
"Like, his two pet peeves are American cars and electric cars," he added.
"And we’re an American electric car so we're in the worst possible situation for someone like Clarkson."