In late December 2022, Musk ran a Twitter poll asking whether he should step down as the head of Twitter. Its Founder Has a Vision for Democratizing Social Media Stepping down as CEO Read More: Thousands Have Joined Mastodon Since Twitter Changed Hands. The platform later reversed course on those decisions. At around the same time, the Twitter account of rival social network Mastodon was suspended from the platform, and links to Mastodon servers were prevented from being posted on Twitter. The journalists’ accounts were later reinstated. By December, he had suspended at least nine prominent journalists from the platform, ostensibly for retweeting or publicizing ElonJet’s tweets about the location of his private jet. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” he tweeted in April. Support for free speechīefore his acquisition of Twitter, Musk said he would like to allow all legal speech to remain on the platform. In December, Musk banned the account, claiming it had violated Twitter’s doxxing policy. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on Nov. The account would often post tweets revealing short flights-the 40 miles from San Jose to San Francisco, for example-that hurt the electric vehicle billionaire’s environmentally-friendly image. 7, 2022, Musk tweeted that he would not ban an account that monitored the movements of his Gulfstream G700 private jet in real time.

Elon Musk by J.T. Owens