Just hours after reinstating his X account, Elon Musk joined Alex Jones for a deeply questionable conversation on X Spaces on Sunday.
The tech billionaire and InfoWars host were joined by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, internet influencer and suspected human trafficker Andrew Tate, and an ensemble of other conservative personalities for a 3-hour audio stream, which was largely spent slathering Musk in praise.
“Elon Musk’s courage has broken the backs of the globalists,” Jones said of his return to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “They’ll never be able to turn this around again unless they have a nuclear war.”
Audio dropped in and out as they peddled conspiracy theories about government censorship, the World Economic forum, climate change and the fall of human civilization.
Musk also explained his decision to reinstate Jones, accusing X’s previous leadership of unfairly targeting the conspiracy theorist with the permanent ban.
Jones’ account was banned in 2018 for violating the site’s abusive behavior policy. For years, he promoted the idea that the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 was a hoax.
Last year, Jones was ordered to pay families of the 26 victims more than $1 billion for making defamatory claims.
Musk also responded to claims that X’s old owners manipulated the news cycle through the Trending page, saying, “I’d say, as a general rule of thumb, whatever conspiracy theory you’ve got about Twitter is probably true, even more true than you think it is.”
Musk reinstated Jones’ account early Sunday, after taking the matter to a vote in an X post the morning prior.
Calling the decision a matter of principle the day prior, Musk told X followers, “I vehemently disagree with what he said about Sandy Hook, but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not?”
“If the people vote him back on, this will be bad for X financially, but principles matter more than money,” he went on.
The CEO thumbed his nose at advertisers fleeing the platform during an interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit last month, where he said, “If somebody’s going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself.”