Tesla founder, Elon Musk has warned that a President Kamala Harris would use the levers of power to shut down X.
Musk, who famously acquired the social media platform for 44 billions dollars to ‘protect free speech’, spoke to podcaster Joe Rogan about its future after the election.
“If you didn’t do it, no one would have,” Rogan said. “And here’s the hilarious narrative that I keep hearing from idiots. ‘Elon’s a bad businessman. Twitter is worth, you know, 400% less than when he bought it.’ No, it wasn’t worth that in the first place. It wasn’t worth $44 billion, you f—ing morons. Wrong. And also, you’re not taking into account the advertiser boycott. That’s total bulls—.”
Musk agreed and said the Orwellian-named Center for Countering Digital Hate was a “total scam organization” like the Ministry of Truth. He referred to the group as a “censorship organization” that “pushed the advertisers to boycott.”
Last year, Musk’s X Corp sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate alleging it had published “misleading claims” and exaggerated the prevalence of harmful content on X to thwart investment from advertisers.
While Musk said that some aspects of the boycott have lessened, this election will be a decisive moment in the battle between government censorship and freedom of speech.
“I think if Trump wins, we’ll see, you know, probably most of the boycott will lift,” he said. “But if Kamala wins, we’ll see that boycott gets stronger and they’ll friggin’ shut [it] down. There’s no way that a Kamala puppet regime would allow X to exist.”
“You really think that they’ll be able to shut it down, though? Is there a pathway to that?” the podcast host asked, later inquiring, “What would they do?”
Musk offered a few scenarios he believes could happen.
“They can sic the DOJ [Department of Justice] on you know, and say like, you know, they’ve got this whole thing about like hate speech, misinformation or whatever, except that they’re the ones pushing the misinformation. But that doesn’t stop them from filing massive, you know, lawsuits and using the DOJ,” he said.
Last year, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, accusing Musk’s company of discriminating against asylum recipients and refugees in its hiring decisions. A federal judge put that lawsuit on hold pending the results of SpaceX’s own suit.