Elon Musk says there’s a ‘significant' risk someone will try to kill him

Elon Musk might be the world’s richest man but he’s definitely not the most popular.

No one knows this better than the Chief Twit himself, who has revealed there could well be a target on his head.

During a two-hour Q&A on Twitter Spaces over the weekend, Musk said: “Frankly the risk of something bad happening to me, or even literally being shot, is quite significant.”

He added: “It’s not that hard to kill me if somebody wanted to, so hopefully they don’t and fate smiles upon the situation with me and it does not happen.”

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The Tesla boss also defended his “absolutist” stance on free speech, insisting that he just wanted “a future where we’re not oppressed, our speech is not suppressed, and we can say what we want to say without fear of reprisals".

“As long as you’re not really causing harm to somebody else, then you should be allowed to say what you want,” he stressed.

Much of his Saturday night discussion was dedicated to the so-called “Twitter Files” – a cache of internal Twitter communications which were reviewed by journalist Matt Tabbi and released on Friday.

The documents dated from October 2020, during the run-up to the presidential election, when the social media platform prevented users from sharing a New York Post story about a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Screenshots of emails sent at the time confirmed that Twitter employees deliberately censored, suspended or banned users who commented on the controversy surrounding the computer’s contents.

“If Twitter is doing one team’s bidding before an election shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election, that is the definition of election interference,” Musk said.

The Tesla founder said he hadn’t read the released files himself but had given Taibbi and fellow journalist Bari Weiss “unfettered access” to the behind-the-scenes discussions – teasing that a second round of Twitter Filles would drop again soon, without giving an exact date.

“I’m not controlling the narrative. It’s just obvious there’s been a lot of control of information, suppression of information, including things that affected elections, and that just all need to be … you just want to have the stuff out there,” he said.

“The idea here is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future.”

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