Twitter owner Elon Musk confirmed on Saturday that he does “not have any suicidal thoughts.” The businessman made the remarks while exposing the details of how the social media platform quelled the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
“If I committed suicide, it’s not real,” Musk stated during a livestream titled “Elon Musk Joins Us Again Live – #TwitterFilesLive Coverage.”
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The title refers to the “Twitter Files,” the name Musk has given to the once-private communications among the platform’s former executives during the 2020 election.
Musk had alerted his followers that the files showcasing Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden ‘laptop from Hell’ story would be revealed during the event, and hundreds of thousands were tuned in to hear what the platform’s new owner had to say about his predecessors’ handling of the scandal.
With the assistance of journalist Matt Taibbi, Musk published internal documents detailing how Twitter execs had colluded with US government agencies to quash news about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son. The device turned up at a Delaware repair shop bristling with incriminating emails.
Three weeks before the election, the New York Post broke a story about files retrieved from the laptop. The exposé included emails about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, among other matters.
Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account at the time and barred users from sharing links to the story, arguing that it violated its controversial “hacked materials” policy.
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The Twitter Spaces Livestream wasn’t the first time Musk had joked about his potentially untimely death. In May, he told followers that “it’s been nice knowin’ ya” in case he were to “die under mysterious circumstances.”
The billionaire’s comments on “suicidal thoughts” were seen by some as a reaction to the sudden and unexpected death of antivirus pioneer and multi-millionaire John McAfee, who died in a Spanish prison last year after similarly stating he was not suicidal and that if he turned up dead it would be a matter of foul play.