Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Inc., says if he successfully acquires Twitter, he will reverse the platform’s ban on former United States President Donald Trump.
The Tesla CEO said this on Tuesday at the Financial Times’s Future of the Car conference.
Musk recently inked a $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter, but the deal is yet to be finalised.
Speaking virtually at the conference, he said it was a “mistake” for the microblogging platform to permanently ban the former president.
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“Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam accounts… I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” Musk said.
“I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.
“I would reverse the permanent ban. I don’t own Twitter yet. So this is not like a thing that will definitely happen because what if I don’t own Twitter?”
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Twitter permanently suspended Trump from the platform in January 2021 following the attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol.
The company said it decided after the Jan. 6 riot “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
At the time, Trump had more than 80 million followers on the platform.
Last month, Trump said he wouldn’t return to Twitter even if his account is reinstated but would remain on his own social media platform, Truth Social.
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