‘If I Commit Suicide, It’s Not Real’: Elon Musk Addresses Speculations About His Mental Health
By Nina Nguyen
Elon Musk said during a live Q&A session following the first batch release relating to the “Twitter Files” that he is not having suicidal thoughts, as some have been suggesting.
The comment was a response to a question about whether the new Twitter CEO was “suicidal” because there had been lots of talk about Musk’s mental state.
“I do not have any suicidal thoughts … If I commit suicide, it’s not real!” Musk said late Dec. 3 as 100,000 people tuned into the discussion on Twitter Spaces. The “Twitter Files” are a trove of documents revealing Twitter’s censorship activities in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Musk joked that given the revelations in the files and his expressed plans to ensure that political powers have no undisclosed influence at the company going forward, powerful figures and institutions may want him out of the way.
“Twitter is the one company that’s no longer colluding and is no longer just going with this NPC group think, I should probably increase my security or something,” he said.
The term NPC is derived from non-player-characters in video games, an internet meme that describes people who follow the mainstream narrative rather than think for themselves and make their own decisions.
The series of internal Twitter communications, released by Musk’s new leadership of Twitter and independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday, unveiled communications showing how former Twitter executives censored reports about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Musk said earlier in the week that this amounted to election interference.
The billionaire on Saturday also denied claims on media reports about Twitter being “some sort of right-wing hellscape,” saying it “absolutely isn’t.”
“And in fact there are far fewer bots, far fewer trolls and it’s actually, I think, way more fun and interesting. And we’re seeing that in the user minutes and in the daily average users.”
Musk said that Twitter’s censorship had been biased toward Democrat candidates, noting there was “a very different standard applied to Republican candidates in the U.S. versus Democrat candidates.”
“I’m not saying this is definitely the case. There appears to have been a double standard where Democrats were not censored and left causes were not censored but right causes and Republicans were,” he told the Q&A session audience.
“I think this is frankly obvious to anyone who uses Twitter without any extra exposure of Twitter files. It was not even-handed.”
The billionaire commented that Twitter’s censorship of people on the right side of politics was “frankly the behavior that is to be expected from an organization that is based in San Francisco, which is far left.”
“So from their standpoint, it wouldn’t seem like that they’re being unfair,” he noted. “It’s simply how they see the world.”
Apple Resumes Advertising
During the Q&A session, Musk also addressed claims that many advertisers are fleeing Twitter after he took over the platform and made sweeping changes to both staff and the system, such as easing many of Twitter’s content moderation practices.
The Tesla CEO said that Apple, which is Twitter’s “single biggest advertiser historically and presently,” has fully resumed advertising, “which is appreciated.”
“I think we’re starting to see a lot of other advertisers also resume their spending,” he added. “I think people would read all these stories in the media and then think that they were true, and they’re not true.”
