HUMZA Yousaf believes Elon Musk has a “whole team of people” looking at his direct messages on Twitter/X after the American suggested the former first minister had been “racist” in his private communications.

The pair first got into a feud online back in October 2023 after Musk called Yousaf a “blatant racist” after watching a highly selective clip of a speech filmed when the SNP MSP was justice secretary.

The row continued this year between the pair following riots in England and Northern Ireland in the summer which were sparked after the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Stockport in July and fueled by false information on social media.

The former SNP leader accused Musk of having “amplified” white supremacists and far-right neo-Nazi conspiracy theories, highlighting how he had controversially claimed that “civil war is inevitable”.

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Responding on Twitter/X, Musk claimed Yousaf is “super, super racist” and dared him to sue.

The Twitter/X owner also said: “Legal discovery will show that however big a racist he’s been in public communications he is vastly worse in private communications.”

Yousaf said Musk’s claims “caught him by surprise” and he “started to wonder what he was talking about”, so checked his private messages on Twitter/X, after assuming the platform's owner “has access to X DMs (direct messages)”.

The former first minister said “he is certain” that Musk has access to his private messages, and that he “scours the private messages of those that he sees as a threat”.

“I am certain he has a whole team of people who are looking at any information they can gather on me and try to use it to besmirch my reputation,” said Yousaf.

Asked on the Elon’s Spies podcast, produced by Tortoise Medi  why he looked through his private messages to check if there was anything incriminating, the former SNP leader said: “It was more out of complete and utter confusion of what the heck he was talking about.

“A very pointed accusation that he’s trying to make, and most people who commented underneath are saying the same thing, you know: ‘Go on Elon, release his Twitter DMs.'

“I’m thinking, I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, have I made an off-colour joke? Have I said something in a private communication? So, I thought I better do the belt and braces thing, and as I say there was nothing there, and unsurprisingly so.”

He added: “But here is somebody who is basically saying to me by the way ‘you better watch out; I’m going to release stuff on you and it’s going to make your life hell’.”

When asked by the show's host whether he was concerned Musk’s reference to “private communications” could be a reference to communications made outside of X by him, he said “that is genuinely the fear”.

The podcast added that there is no evidence to suggest that Musk has accessed Yousaf’s private messages, on or off of X, and that the billionaire has denied having ever accessed private messages on the platform.