Tesla CEO Elon Musk put “West Coast high tech” on blast this week, criticize them for having anointed themselves “the de facto arbiter of free speech” after several Big Tech companies enacted a widespread purge of right-wing users while stifling competition that stepped in to fill the gap.
“A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk tweeted this week in response to a satirical article from the Babylon Bee poking fun at leftwing attacks on “evil fascist dictator” Donald Trump.
A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2021
Many on the right have called on Musk, who recently surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world, to create a truly free speech platform to compete with current social media monopolies like Twitter and Facebook. While he rarely weighs in on politics, Musk has been a vocal supporter of free markets, and recently relocated his company's headquarters to Texas in response to California's excessively restrictive COVID mandates.
Demands for an uncensored platform escalated after Amazon, Google and Apple partnered to de-app – and, ultimately, de-platform – the Twitter alternative Parler, where many conservatives had flocked after seeing President Donald Trump banned from Twitter, or being banned themselves. Parler is now suing Amazon for kicking the website off their servers.