Musk Reveals He Will Not Sign Autographs 'Ever Again' After Making Troubling Statement
Speaking during the “Twitter Files” live coverage event Saturday afternoon, company CEO Elon Musk said that he considered himself a target for possible assassination attempts.
“Frankly the risk of something bad happening or literally even being shot is quite significant. I’m definitely not going to be doing any open-air car parades, let me put it that way,” Musk said in a Twitter Spaces discussion, as reported by Fox News.
“It’s not that hard to kill me if somebody wanted to,” he added, “so hopefully they don’t.”
He’s not wrong. Assassination is practically impossible to prevent short of a full-time personal protection staff to rival the president’s, and even that’s not a 100 percent guarantee of anything. Getting away with an assassination is a different issue, but anyone looking to put a bullet in Musk probably wouldn’t have “escape” as a top priority afterward anyway.
Later that evening, Musk told a group of paparazzi outside Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., that he would not be signing any autographs — for the rest of his life.
“I’ve made it clear,” Musk said. “I’m not doing any more — any more signings, ever again.”
“After tonight,” one enterprising paparazzo shouted out — hey, it was worth a try, right?
“No,” Musk said before ducking into a waiting Tesla, surrounded by his security detail.
The lighting is a little off, but you can see the video from TMZ here:
Musk has made no explicit connection between the two statements — his unwillingness to sign autographs and his concern for his personal safety — but it would explain the sudden reticence from the Tesla founder, who “normally tends to hold court with [paparazzi] and shoots the s*** with them, offering off-the-cuff answers on a number of issues — including crypto, ‘SNL,’ and his own companies,” according to TMZ.
TMZ also theorized a connection between the two statements.
The context of all of this, of course, was the release Saturday of internal Twitter documents that showed a pattern of censoring on both the right and the left, though far more on the right.
1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
“We’re just gonna put all the information out there try to get a clean slate,” Musk said of the document release. “We will be iteratively better and it will force other media companies to also be more truthful or else they’ll lose their readership.”
It would be nice to think that’s true. I hope it is. But the American people — on both the right and the left — have sometimes demonstrated a declining appetite for truth over the past decade or two.
You can fool some of the people all the time, it’s said. And those people all seem to be on social media.
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