While some feel that tech mogul Elon Musk’s recent 9.2 percent Twitter stock purchase and his offer to buy Twitter outright is a sign that the restoration of free speech could return to the platform, to others, Musk represents the threat of further Chinese influence over the platform.
Speaking at a TED event in Vancouver, Canada, on April 14, Musk said that the reason he’s attempting to buy Twitter is not to make money but to reduce the “civilizational risk” censorship poses to democracy and freedom and to remove restrictions to free speech.
Despite his stated good intentions, Musk has lavishly praised the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) on various occasions.
Speaking in the “Daily Drive Podcast” in 2020, Musk said “China rocks in my opinion,” referring to one of the most tyrannical regimes in the world that routinely enslaves its own people. He also said that China is a “world leader in digitalization.”
In March 2021, Musk praised China’s climate plans during an appearance on CCP state television—despite the communist regime having recently ramped up its coal production, postponing its carbon reduction plans.
“I’d like to strike an optimistic note and I’m very confident that the future of China is going to be great and that China is headed towards being the biggest economy in the world and a lot of prosperity in the future,” the Tesla CEO told China Central Television in March 2021.
To Peter Navarro, former White House trade adviser under the Trump administration—what someone did is more important than what they say they will do.
“I don’t trust Elon Musk. I don’t trust him because he made a deal with the communist Chinese devil to produce his Tesla cars there. And he’s very vulnerable to the blackmail of the CCP,” Navarro, author of “In Trump Time,” told The Epoch Times.
“So having him take over Twitter … It’s not clear to me what his agenda is, I do know that he doesn’t care about American workers. He doesn’t care about concentration camps in Xinjiang province. He doesn’t care about the free people of Taiwan or the imprisoned people of Hong Kong. I was not overjoyed when Musk made that move,” Navarro added.
