close video Ray Wang on Musk’s Twitter management: Important for Elon to ‘rip the band-aid off’
Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang weighs in on Elon Musk’s management of Twitter amid layoffs and restructuring and discusses Former DNI Director John Ratcliffe calling TikTok a national security threat on ‘Cavuto: Coast to Coast.’
Elon Musk said Saturday evening that there is "definitely some risk" to his personal safety during an extensive discussion about free speech, changes he has made to Twitter, and the release of internal communications from the fall of 2020 about what led the tech giant to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
"Frankly the risk of something bad happening or literally even being shot is quite significant. I'm definitely not going to be doing any open air car parades, let me put it that way," Musk said in a Twitter Spaces discussion.
"It's not that hard to kill me if somebody wanted to, so hopefully they don't."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk smiles as he addresses guests at the Offshore Northern Seas 2022 (ONS) meeting in Stavanger, Norway on August 29, 2022. (Carina Johansen / Getty Images)
The new owner of Twitter rifted on the importance of free speech and his future plans for the platform throughout the roughly two hour discussion.
"Throughout history, free speech has been highly unusual, not common. So we have to fight really hard to keep that because it's such a rare thing and it's by no means something that's default," Musk said. "Controlled speech is the default, not free speech."
ELON MUSK GIVES KANYE WEST THE BOOT FROM TWITTER OVER OFFENSIVE POSTS: ‘I TRIED MY BEST’
Twitter Headquarters is seen in San Francisco, California, United States on November 22, 2022. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The discussion came one day after journalist Matt Taibbi published internal communications among Twitter's top brass, showing that the platform suspended and censored users who commented on the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story.
"Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography," Taibbi tweeted.
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Musk claimed on Saturday that the files show Twitter "was acting like an arm of the" Democratic National Committee in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential elections. He also teased the release of more files in the near future.
"We’re just gonna put all the information out there try to get a clean slate we will be iteratively better and it will force other media companies to also be more truthful or else they’ll lose their readership," Musk said Saturday.