Podcast host Joe Rogan told billionaire Elon Musk on Monday that he “changed the course of history” by buying Twitter in 2022, recounting how the government had become intertwined with social media platforms.
In October 2022, Musk won a legal battle to become the sole owner of Twitter, now known as X, and promptly fired several top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust and safety. On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the popular podcast host thanked Musk for deciding to buy the company, noting how social media companies had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.
“First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for buying Twitter. Thank you so much. I’m not exaggerating when I think you changed the course of history. I really do. I really think you made a fork in the road. We were headed down a path of censorship and of control of narratives that is unprecedented,” Rogan said.
“Forget about what they were able to do back when they had newspapers and the media under control. What they were doing with social media by suppressing information and when you had a combined government effort — like with what they were doing with the laptop story,” Rogan added. “We have 51 former intelligence agents saying that this is Russian disinformation, take it off offline, and Twitter complied. If you didn’t buy that we wouldn’t have known that. We had no idea.”
Musk explained how he became aware that the system on Twitter was changing, pointing out how former President Donald Trump was permanently banned from the platform after Jan. 6, despite calling on his supporters not to riot.
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“The reason I bought [Twitter] was because I’m pretty attuned, since I was the most interacted with users on Twitter before the acquisition,” Musk said. “So before the acquisition I had more interactions then — like there’s some accounts like [former President Barack] Obama and whatever had a higher follower count — but I had the most number of interactions of any account in the system. So I was very attuned to like if they change the system, I can tell immediately. And I’m like, something weird is going on here, you know?”
“I just got increasingly uneasy and obviously when they de-platformed a sitting president, you know, de-platformed Trump — that was just insane. The things he was posting … he was posting good things. He was saying, ‘Hey, we do not riot, but don’t do any destruction of property, please stay calm.’ That’s the kind of stuff he was posting, and you’re like, ‘Uh, what’s wrong with that?’ Then some people said, ‘Oh, that’s like some sort of dog whistle, he means the opposite.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, so we’ll give you Trump’s account. Now you post what you think he should post because you can post nothing, he can ask people to calm down, like what? It was insane, it didn’t make any sense,” Musk said.
Following Musk’s acquisition of the company, the billionaire collaborated with independent journalists and authors like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger to release the “Twitter Files,” which revealed that the company’s former executives justified banning Trump by citing the “context surrounding” the former president and his supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”
After the interview with Musk was released Monday evening, Rogan announced on X that he endorsed Trump in his bid for the White House.
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