\n
![](\"https:\/\/media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com\/image\/upload\/t_fit_1500w\/rockcms\/2022-12\/221202-elon-musk-mjf-1621-9114c5.jpg\")
<\/p>\n [ad_1]
\n<\/p>\n
Speaking at the 2023 DealBook Summit\u00a0in New York on Wednesday, Elon Musk, the owner of social media site X (formerly Twitter), scoffed at advertisers boycotting the platform because of antisemitic posts he amplified there.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf somebody\u2019s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f—yourself.\u201d He added, \u201cDon\u2019t advertise.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also implied that fans of his, and of X, would boycott those advertisers in kind. He specifically took aim at\u00a0Disney.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail,\u201d Musk threatened.<\/p>\n
He also told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin, \u201cI have no problem being hated. Hate away.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, Musk has promoted and sometimes verbally endorsed what the\u00a0White House called\u00a0\u201cantisemitic and racist hate\u201d on X, formerly Twitter, the social media platform he owns and runs as CTO.<\/p>\n
He called those tweets, \u201cone of the most foolish if not the most foolish thing I\u2019ve ever done on the platform.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sorry for that tweet or post,\u201d he said. He added, \u201cI tried my best to clarify, six ways to Sunday, but you know at least I think over time it will be obvious that in fact, far from being antisemitic, I am in fact philosemitic.\u201d<\/p>\n
His inflammatory posts on the social media platform led large advertisers, including Disney, Apple, and many others, to suspend campaigns there, and drove some famous users away from the platform, including Paris Mayor\u00a0Anne Hidalgo.<\/p>\n
Musk, who is also the CEO of\u00a0Tesla\u00a0and SpaceX, has denied that he is antisemitic, and said that on X, \u201cClear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also traveled to Israel this week, where he met and spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When Netanyahu said he wanted to \u201cderadicalize\u201d and \u201crebuild\u201d Gaza, Musk offered to help. Musk told Sorkin on stage that his visit to Israel was planned before his tweets, and were not part of an \u201capology tour.\u201d Previously, Musk had said he wanted to bring SpaceX satellite communications service to Israel and humanitarian organizations in Gaza.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s personal account on X currently displays a follower count of more than 164 million — though tech blog Mashable\u00a0reported in August\u00a0that a majority of Musk\u2019s listed followers appeared to be inauthentic or inactive accounts.<\/p>\n
Later in the interview, Musk mentioned SpaceX\u2019s competition with Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company, and said he was glad Bezos was also spending money on space travel. \u201cIf there were a button I could press to delete Blue Origin, I wouldn\u2019t press it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sorkin asked, \u201cDo you feel like anybody has leverage over you?\u201d<\/p>\n
Musk replied, \u201cIf we make bad products that people don\u2019t want to use, the users will vote with their resources and use something else. My companies are overseen by regulators. SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla \u2014 are overseen by cumulatively by\u2026a few hundred regulators because we\u2019re in 55 countries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, he noted that he complies with nearly all the regulations levied upon his companies, but \u201conce in awhile\u201d he disagrees with a regulation and would object to it and disobey. \u201cI\u2019m incredibly rule-following,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n
Sorkin asked, \u201cHow do you think about the leverage that the Chinese have over you?\u201d alluding to Tesla\u2019s factory there and the company\u2019s reliance on Chinese consumers for a percentage of its sales. Sorkin added, \u201cIs it hypocritical for you to be doing business in China, or other countries, as it relates to X and other things that don\u2019t follow this free speech path that you have espoused?\u201d<\/p>\n
The CEO replied, \u201cThe best that the platform can do is adhere to the laws of any given country. Do you think there\u2019s something more we can do than that?\u201d<\/p>\n
He later added that he believes the Chinese electric car companies are extremely competitive, and said that many people believe the top ten EV companies in the world will be Tesla and nine Chinese makers.<\/p>\n
On OpenAI and its recent boardroom struggles, Musk said he had talked to a lot of people but had not found out what precisely led to the recent firing and then re-hiring of CEO Sam Altman.\u00a0He also said he has \u201cmixed feelings\u201d about Altman personally, hinting that he feels like the OpenAI CEO has too much power. \u201cThe ring of power can corrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n
When it was founded, OpenAI\u2019s original board\u00a0included both Altman and Musk, but Musk\u00a0left in 2018\u00a0after poaching a star engineer from the company to run Autopilot software engineering at Tesla.<\/p>\n
Musk also said that he\u2019s worried about the danger of AI harming humanity, and that he was \u201chaving trouble sleeping at night\u201d because of it.<\/p>\n
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n [ad_2]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] Speaking at the 2023 DealBook Summit\u00a0in New York on Wednesday, Elon Musk, the owner of social media site X (formerly Twitter), scoffed at advertisers boycotting the platform because of antisemitic posts he amplified there. \u201cIf somebody\u2019s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f—yourself.\u201d He added, \u201cDon\u2019t advertise.\u201d He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13488,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13486"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}