Elon Musk: I’ll say what I want, even if it makes me lose money

During an interview on CNBC, Elon Musk defended his right to say inflammatory things on Twitter, even if those statements cost him money. Asked why he shied away from even tweeting, he briefly sidestepped. and he finally quoted the Princess Bride To explain his cavalier attitude towards everything he shares on Twitter.

It was a very strange interview.

The interview came after a particularly troubling round of tweets for Musk, in which he promoted conspiracy theories about the Texas mass shooting, after claiming that George Soros “hates humanity”. Was accused and retweeted defamatory theories about crime and race.

After a series of mostly softball questions about Tesla and time management, CNBC’s David Farmer asked why he tweets conspiracy theories and makes statements that have been criticized as racist and anti-Semitic , especially when they could lose them customers and damage the companies they run.

After a very long and uncomfortable pause, Musk referenced a scene from the 1987 film the Princess Bride, In which Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya character confronts the man who killed her father.

“He says, ‘Offer me money. Offer me power,'” Musk said. “‘I don’t care.'”

“You just don’t care which way Musk looked at him,” Faber replied. “You want to share what you have to say.”

Ultimately, Musk said, “I’ll say what I have to say, and if the result is losing money, then so be it.”

As CEO of a public company, there are limits to what Musk can say on Twitter or elsewhere. If he tweets misleading things about Tesla, shareholders will sue him – as they did after he tweeted about taking the company private at $420 a share. (The shareholders lost the lawsuit and Musk was found not liable for their losses.)

His tweets have caused him all kinds of headaches over the years. His tech-private tweets in 2018 earned him a $40 million fine by the Securities and Exchange Commission and cost him the presidency of Tesla. He is currently under a consent decree with the SEC that requires an attorney to approve his tweets about Tesla before they can be posted. A federal appeals court recently ruled against Musk’s efforts to vacate the consent decree.

We have gone through all this before. Musk is asked why he tweets incendiary stuff, and he points to his follower count to justify his increasingly unruly behavior — as if a large portion of those followers aren’t just rubber-necks. Is. His followers and shareholders beg him to stop tweeting, but he doubles and triples again and again. This, one might say, is unimaginable.