The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, denied a report that he communicated with former President Donald Trump regarding his purchase of Twitter, with the CEO of Trump’s Truth Social platform saying media outlets misreported his statements.
The newspaper’s article included a quote from Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes to Fox News where he said, “President Trump, basically before Elon Musk bought it, actually said to go and buy it because the goal of our company is really to build a community where people are in a family-friendly, safe environment.“ The Post then included a claim in its headline that Trump ”quietly” encouraged Musk to purchase the platform.
The NY Post also did not reach out to Nunes, a former congressman from California, for clarification, according to his team. It’s not clear why the newspaper put “quietly” in its article headline when Nunes’s comments to Fox make no such mention of that.
“We encouraged Elon Musk to buy [Twitter], because someone has to take on these tech tyrants,” Nunes also said in the Fox Business interview earlier this week. “Donald Trump wanted to make sure that the American people got their voice back and that the internet was open and that’s what we are doing.”
After it was jointly announced Musk would purchase Twitter for $44 billion, there has been speculation about whether Trump would return to the platform, where he had amassed tens of millions of followers. But Trump has said several times that he has no intention of joining Twitter and instead will use Truth Social.
However, other conservatives have expressed hope that Musk, who has described himself as a proponent of free speech, would reinstate some prominent Twitter accounts that have been banned in recent months. Musk, meanwhile, has criticized Twitter’s current content moderation policies and recently said the company erred when it blocked the reach of a NY Post article detailing Hunter Biden’s laptop.
