Musk, Bloomberg, Bezos: America's aristocracy of tech robber barons lives by its own rules

Elon Musk's 'pedo guy' trial revealed that supposed equality between billionaires and mere mortals is a fiction

Before 1948, if a British duke, viscount or baron was accused of a felony, he was tried not alongside the common criminals in the Old Bailey, but by a jury of his peers in the House of Lords.

I thought about that two-tiered system of criminal justice quite a bit last week, when I spent four days in a Los Angeles courtroom covering the civil defamation trial of Elon Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX chief had been sued by Vernon Unsworth, a British cave explorer who assisted with the Tham Luang cave rescue, for calling him a "pedo guy" on Twitter.