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Life comes at you quick. Six months in the past, Elon Musk wrote, “For Twitter to deserve public belief, it have to be politically impartial, which successfully means upsetting the far proper and the far left equally.”
On Monday morning, weeks after shopping for the platform for $44 billion, he shared a meme that includes a Nazi soldier after which informed his 115 million followers to vote Republican in Tuesday’s midterms.
“To independent-minded voters: Shared energy curbs the worst excesses of each events, due to this fact I like to recommend voting for a Republican Congress, provided that the Presidency is Democratic,” he wrote.
Musk has confronted criticism for firing roughly 50 p.c of the corporate’s workers final week, together with these answerable for monitoring disinformation days forward of Election Day. The purge was likened by some critics to a Class 5 hurricane.
“Hardcore Democrats or Republicans by no means vote for the opposite aspect,” Musk added on Monday, “so impartial voters are those who truly determine who’s in cost!”
The CEO’s tweet on voting purple garnered over 43,000 retweets and almost 180,000 likes a few hours after posting. His Nazi meme, which used a photograph of a German Wehrmacht soldier with a cage of provider pigeons in the course of the Nazi invasion of France, had about 14,000 retweets within the three hours after it was posted.
Musk, who in late 2021 surpassed Jeff Bezos in wealth with a reported web price of $219 billion, has had a rocky begin in his newest tech foray, blaming a current “huge drop in income” on “activist teams pressuring advertisers,” somewhat than his personal antics.
At a marketing campaign occasion in Chicago on Friday, President Joe Biden known as out the positioning after Musk shared—then deleted—a baseless conspiracy idea in regards to the assault on Paul Pelosi, calling Twitter “an outfit that spews lies all the world over.”
In an effort to vary his fortune and switch a revenue on the traditionally unprofitable social media platform, Musk has proposed a pay-to-play verification system and an finish to permabans, together with one on Donald Trump.
However the brand new plan didn’t cease the thin-skinned billionaire from suspending comic Kathy Griffin on Monday after she modified the identify on her profile to Musk’s and inspired folks to vote Democrat.
“Going ahead, any Twitter handles participating in impersonation with out clearly specifying ‘parody’ will probably be completely suspended,” he tweeted.