Mark Cuban: Elon Musk’s X is not a ‘bastion of free speech’

“Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital marketplace of the city where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in an April 2022 statement when the acquisition was announced.

Musk said he wants to improve Twitter by introducing “new features, making algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating spam bots and authenticating all people.”

But today’s X, Cuban said, is not what Musk originally promised.

“He’s as free as Elon wants. He can bully. He can change the algorithm. He can suspend anyone he wants at any time,” Cuban wrote on Sunday.

“He is the supreme arbiter of all things here. And the biggest power play is making everyone think their speech is free speech, until he decides it’s not, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Cuban, however, didn’t stop using X.

“That’s why whenever he yells at me or yells at me, I’m going to throw something back at him. It’s fun,” Cuban said in his post to Voulgaris.

“And you know I always enjoy and respect our back and forth.”

This isn’t the first time Cuban has accused Musk of running X based on his own whims and fancies.

Last month, Cuban said in an interview on “The Daily Show” that Musk could have tweaked X’s algorithm to suit his own preferences.

“When you write an algorithm—I haven’t written much, it’s been a while—but when you write one, you can set the parameters of what you want to see happen. And he certainly did that with the things he did. like,” Cuban said, without providing evidence of Musk’s manipulation of the algorithm.

Cuban’s accusation spurred a response from Musk, who wrote a few days later in an X post that his platform was open-source, unlike other platforms.

Cuban, Musk said, was seeing more content from right-wing accounts because the algorithm took into account Cuban’s frequent interactions with them. Cuban is known to respond to a wide variety of accounts about X.

Musk later followed up with another post that called Cuban a giant turd in human form.

Cuban only had a brief response for Musk: a series of hand-heart emojis.

In June, Cuban told Business Insider that he had no problem with Musk, despite their heated exchanges on X.

In addition to X, the pair went head-to-head on topics such as corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and this year’s US presidential election.

“I enjoy sparring with Elon. He likes to troll and so do I,” Cuban said in June.

Musk’s representatives at X and Cuban did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.