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Joe Rogan welcomed Elon Musk to his podcast for an election-eve conversation. During the discussion, he thanked the billionaire for buying Twitter.
The two conversed for more than 2.5 hours on The Joe Rogan Experience, discussing a wide variety of topics.
One included Rogan — who has long championed free speech and shared his concerns about censorship — thanking Musk for taking complete control of the social media app.
“Thank you so much for buying Twitter. So much,” Rogan reiterated. “I’m not exaggerating when I think you change the course of history. I really do. I really think you made a fork in the road. We were headed down a path of censorship and control of narratives that was unprecedented.”
Elon Musk said information with newspapers and other media outlets were being controlled, but felt he needed to take a stand when the same began happening with social media.
“I bought it because I’m pretty attuned since I was the most interacted with user on Twitter before the acquisition,” said Musk. “So before the acquisition, I had more interactions than — some accounts like (Barack) Obama, whatever, had higher followers — but I had the most number of interactions of any account in the system. So I was very attuned to if they change the system, I can tell immediately. And I’m like, ‘Something weird is going on here.’ I just got increasingly uneasy. And obviously, when they de-platformed a sitting president, that was, that was just insane.”
The conversation between Joe Rogan and Elon Musk comes days after the podcast host revealed that Musk personally intervened with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to get Rogan’s episode with Donald Trump published to the X platform. Musk was concerned about potential censorship from Google and YouTube that was supposedly limiting the search results for users seeking out the discussion.
