Elon Musk said he would unban former President Donald Trump on Twitter once he officially takes over the social media platform.
The Tesla tycoon made the comment Tuesday during an interview with Financial Times after his $44 billion takeover bid was accepted by Twitter’s board of directors last month.
“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,” Musk added. “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?”
Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter and other large social media platforms after the events at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The then-president was banned from Twitter after he was accused of encouraging his supporters to wreak havoc at the Capitol while Congress was in session to officially certify President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Musk’s Tuesday statement confirmed earlier reports that he vehemently did not support Twitter’s decision to ban the 45th president from its platform.
Musk’s top assistant, Jared Birchall, who is the “point man” for the Tesla CEO’s $44 billion takeover bid of Twitter, told the Wall Street Journal that the idea of suspending a sitting president from Twitter was “insane.”
In an interview with Fox News, Trump confirmed that he is not going back on Twitter and said he would prefer to use his own social network, Truth Social, as his only channel and that he would join it in the next seven days as planned.
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth.”
Truth Social was launched last month and has been running on its new cloud service for the past few days, after being beta tested since February. Its CEO is former California legislator Devin Nunes.
