Elon Musk has claimed the chance of his assassination is “quite significant.”
In a wide-ranging, two-hour Q&A audio chat on Twitter Spaces, the social media platform’s CEO told listeners he “definitely” wouldn’t “be doing any open-air automobile parades, let me put it that way.”
“Frankly the chance of something bad happening to me, and even literally being shot, is sort of significant,” he said.
“It’s not that onerous to kill someone for those who desired to, so hopefully they don’t, and fate smiles upon the situation with me and it doesn’t occur … There’s definitely some risk there.”
The Tesla CEO and world’s richest man – a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” – added that “at the tip of the day, we just need to have a future where we’re not oppressed”.
“[Where] our speech just isn’t suppressed, and we are able to say what we wish to say without fear of reprisals,” he declared.
“So long as you’re not likely causing harm to someone else, then you need to be allowed to say what you would like.”
This attitude has been clear since Musk’s takeover of Twitter last month.
He has reinstated previously suspended accounts including former President Donald Trump, and announced he would grant a “general amnesty” to everyone who had been booted off that had not broken the law or engaged in spam.
Musk also ended Twitter’s policy against Covid-19 misinformation, and dismantled the corporate’s trust and safety teams amid mass lay-offs.
Much of Musk’s conversation on Twitter Spaces, which took place on Saturday night local time, was dedicated to the so-called ‘Twitter Files’, a number of internal documents released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday.
Taibbi’s thread included files that showed Joe Biden’s team instructing Twitter employees to remove specific political content in October 2020, just weeks before he was elected US President.
Screenshots of emails revealed that Twitter employees deliberately suspended, banned or censored users who commented on the controversy surrounding the contents of Mr Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop.
“If Twitter is doing one team’s bidding before an election shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election, that’s the definition of election interference,” Musk, who has been highly critical of the platform’s prior management, said.
“Frankly, Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee, it was absurd.”
Musk said he had given Taibbi, in addition to journalist Bari Weiss, “unfettered access” to old internal documents – teasing more can be released and dubbing them the Twitter Files ‘episode two’.
“This just isn’t a North Korea tour guide situation, you get to go anywhere you would like, every time you would like, nonetheless you would like,” he said.
“I’m not controlling the narrative. It’s just obvious there’s been a variety of control of knowledge, suppression of knowledge, including things that affected elections, and that just all have to be … you simply need to have the stuff on the market.”
Musk acknowledged throughout the Twitter Spaces chat, nonetheless, that the Twitter Files release had included some missteps, including “just a few cases where I believe we should always have excluded some email addresses”.
“Publicly posting the names and identities of frontline employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who was amongst the staff named in Taibbi’s tweets, said in a social media post.
“The thought here is to return clean on all the pieces that has happened previously as a way to construct public trust for the long run,” Musk said of the errors.
