There is a formula for working out how long it will take for a conspiracy theory to be made public based on how many people are involved in it.
I guess you could use it in reverse and produce an upper limit on how many people could be involved in a conspiracy if you assume that it has been secret for five years.
That said, Elon Musk gives every impression of being a massive chatterbox who can’t keep his mouth shut even when its the SEC threatening to take Tesla away from him, so I very much doubt any conspiracy involves him.
I would love to see a follow up to that. From what I recall, the PRISM program they used in that study wasn't the only one of its kind, and anything from the 80s or earlier wasn't included. They also didn't make mention of any of the CIA's old projects from the 70s / 80s that get declassified every few years. I wonder how much those would skew the results.
The paper is definitely a worthwhile read; it would be a fun exercise to go through other historical examples of whistleblowing and unmasked conspiracies (e.g. the panama papers, Chelsea Manning's wikileaks disclosures, MKUltra, &c) and see how well the authors' parameter estimates hold up.
I guess you could use it in reverse and produce an upper limit on how many people could be involved in a conspiracy if you assume that it has been secret for five years.
That said, Elon Musk gives every impression of being a massive chatterbox who can’t keep his mouth shut even when its the SEC threatening to take Tesla away from him, so I very much doubt any conspiracy involves him.