At some point, Jamaal Bowman will learn not to pull fire alarms. Right? Right?
Maybe?
What happens when you go on national television and call the world’s wealthiest man a “Nazi” and a “thief” because you dislike his politics? You get to meet a lot of his attorneys is what happens. Unlike when Bowman was in Congress, the Speech and Debate Clause no longer applies, and moments like this become actionable — theoretically, anyway:
JUST IN: Elon Musk announces he is launching a lawsuit after former Rep. Jamaal Bowman called him a “thief” and a “Nazi” on live television.
The comment from Bowman came last night on CNN.
“I’ve had enough. Lawsuit inbound,” Musk said in response to the video clip below. pic.twitter.com/QUpdPFdUPn
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 22, 2025
The Daily Mail picked up the threat this morning, along with the context of Fire Pull Bowman’s remarks:
The verbal barrage began after Joe Borelli, the ex-Republican leader on the New York City Council, argued that much of the discontent seen at Republican town hall events were protests organized by Democrats.
‘That’s not true. And this shows, again, the American people do not trust Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is incompetent in his position,’ the liberal politician, who now runs the super PAC Built to Win, said during the evening broadcast.
Bowman went on to list the reasons why he believes the Tesla founder ‘doesn’t have’ the necessary skills required to hold Musk’s top-ranking position.
‘And how do we know? Because they fired tens of thousands of people, it was challenged in court,’ Bowman began.
‘The court said the people have to go back, and now the people are coming back. He’s incompetent, he’s a thief, he’s a Nazi, and people don’t trust him, period.’
Surely, Bowman has a point. Elon Musk may have created Tesla and SpaceX, sends astronauts and satellites into space on a regular basis, and now captures boosters in flight for re-use. Musk also has amassed the world’s largest private fortune through his commercial ventures. But he’s not as competent as Bowman, for instance, who claims that a device labeled FIRE ALARM looked like a door release.
At any rate, Musk won’t sue Bowman for defamation over the insinuation that he’s less than competent at his job(s). He’ll sue for defamation for calling Musk a “Nazi,” an absurd allegation based on a hand gesture that is common among Republicans and Democrats alike. The charge has been widely debunked, and the only reason to publicize it now is out of malice or stupidity. Musk has clearly gotten tired of this attack and plans to make Bowman a clear example pour encourager les autres.
Is stupidity a defense against defamation? Perhaps, and although Bowman is a former public-school principal, his attorneys can point to a number of Bowman’s statement and actions to depict him as a pure-D moron, including and especially the fire-pull incident. A better defense, especially in light of Musk’s clear status as a ‘public person’ under the Sullivan standard, is that “Nazi” is a hyperbolic statement of disapproval that was not meant to be taken literally.
Unfortunately, both defenses would tend to get defeated by a statement Bowman made at the time of the fire-pull incident. At the time, Bowman attempted to get his fellow Democrats to adopt a set of talking points to defend him for faking a fire alarm, with Politico reporting at the time that one suggested response would be to call Republicans Nazis:
One suggested response from Bowman’s office to questions about the incident: “I believe Congressman Bowman when he says this was an accident. Republicans need to instead focus their energy on the Nazi members of their party before anything else.”
Bowman then claimed that his staffers had created the bullet points and hadn’t asked him for approval before sending it out. He then released a statement explaining why it was inappropriate:
I just became aware that in our messaging guidance, there was inappropriate use of the term Nazi without my consent. I condemn the use of the term Nazi out of its precise definition. It is important to specify the term Nazi to refer to members of the Nazi party & neo-Nazis. https://t.co/DUi92VpUia
— Congressman Jamaal Bowman (@RepBowman) October 2, 2023
So Bowman is on record stating that he only intends to use “NazI” in its “precise definition,” and explicitly condemned it as a term for a broad political attack. That certainly would lead one to believe that Bowman intentionally and fraudulently applied it to Musk for the express purpose of defamation.
That certainly seems … actionable. As well as incompetent.
Anyway, Musk will still have a tough time getting around Sullivan and the court’s normal tolerance of hyperbole in political criticism. Normally, one might wonder whether a plaintiff in this situation would want to waste the resources on such a fight, but Musk has an awful lot of resources. If he wants to make Bowman an example and get some revenge for the smears coming from the Left, Musk has all the resources and all the time in the world to ride this defamation suit to its end, bitter or sweet. And right now, with his businesses under attack and idiots like Bowman trying to turn him into the Left’s Emmanuel Goldstein of the moment, Musk has lots of motivation to make this as painful as possible for Bowman and anyone who chooses to ally themselves to him.
Does Bowman have those resources? He will likely get some support from progressives, at least at first, but the entire Left is not going to outstrip Musk, even if they stay interested long enough to compete. Bowman is about to learn the hard way not to play with fire or alarms, and this time it will cost him a lot more in the process of getting burned.
