Don Lemon has published his full interview with Elon Musk, and it’s exactly the wide-ranging doozy you’d expect ― with an extra dash of racist conspiracy theories.
The at-times chippy conversation released Monday was both the first and last in an exclusive content deal Lemon claims Musk had pitched him. That deal ended hours after the interview earlier this month.
But Lemon insists he hasn’t been “canceled,” despite saying literally exactly that last week.
“Contrary to what you might have heard, we weren’t canceled by X,” he said in the show’s introduction. “Yes, after months of begging me, wooing me to offer some exclusive content on his platform, Elon Musk decided to scrap the deal.”
The former CNN anchor kicked off the hourlong discussion with a question about X (formerly Twitter) and its role in the future of journalism, which Musk used to trumpet his platform’s numbers.
“X is already the No. 1 source of news in the world,” he replied, without any data to support the claim. “It’s the No. 1 way people are informed about any kind of news.”
That led to a longer conversation about the type of content X now tends to boost, including posts from Musk himself, who forced advertisers to flee last year after he amplified an antisemitic conspiracy theory and called it “the actual truth.” Readers may recall Musk pledging to sue the Anti-Defamation League for defamation over the lost revenue and also telling companies who paused ad buys to “go fuck yourself.”
After the uproar, Musk did damage control by visiting the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he conceded he’d been “naïve” about the prevalence of antisemitism, claiming he sees almost none “in the circles that I move in.”
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