Elon Musk

Two dudes who have advanced their careers, in recent years, by saying and doing things to rile people up as they curate their cult of personality points are teaming up to make an announcement that everyone already had on their 2023 bingo card.

You’ve got Elon Musk in one corner — a man who will say just about anything to elevate his brand as the free speech Messiah. And then you’ve got Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the other — Trump’s long-anticipated 2024 rival who has spent the last year using his Republican-dominated state legislature to pass outrageous, so-called “anti-woke” legislation packaged to appeal to the furthest-right MAGA voters and cushion his 2024 bid.

At least, that’s what the billionaire is claiming.

Just shortly after Tucker Carlson announced in a video lauding Elon Musk’s social media platform as the only safe space left for Truth Tellers like himself that he’d be taking his “show” to Twitter, the billionaire set the record straight.

Musk — who’s been doing favors for white nationalists and giving far-right extremist rhetoric an elevated platform since his Twitter takeover — tweeted to clarify that there’s no deal with Tucker and also to maintain that he, the founding father of free speech, is not playing favorites.

Tucker Carlson is scooping up his massive viewership and taking his show to Elon Musk’s janky, zombified Twitter.

Set against the backdrop of what appears to be the inside of a rustic and masculine cabin in the wood, Carlson made the announcement with a familiar scowl and posted the video to his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon. He said a bunch of his usual stuff about the media being misleading and cable news being propaganda, while making some unsubtle digs at Fox, like:

“The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it,” he said.

The world’s second richest man has been having a really “painful” time running Twitter, the once-handy and dare I say functional social media platform that has become completely unusable since his takeover.

Elon Musk also admitted that he only went through with the $44 billion purchase because a judge was about to force him to buy it.

In a wide-ranging interview with BBC, the billionaire addressed a number of issues that have been plaguing his image and his social media platform in recent months as he’s instituted mass layoffs and claimed he’s wiping the website of bots and fake news, while deplatforming journalists and trusted media organizations.