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Because he does not believe in freedom of speech. He is a right-wing authoritarian, and is only interested in gaining power and controlling everyone else.

Well, I don't think I'm a "musketeer" and I'm certainly not a conservative, but I have been a fan of Tesla for a while now so maybe I'll take a stab at this.

I want to start by saying Elon has always been an asshole. He's incredibly intelligent, and clearly doesn't give a shit about most people. Even among his own kids he only seems to act like a real father to one of them (the one nicknamed X). To me, that wasn't much of a problem when he was just running Tesla and spacex. You don't need to be friendly to run a manufacturing company, and Tesla is doing what every other company has so far failed to do: transition light vehicles away from fossil fuels. So despite Elon's personality I support him running Tesla. Even now that other companies are finally making EV's seriously they are moving far more slowly than Tesla is at ramping production of EV's.

Second, before he bought twitter, almost everything he said there was him trolling or joking. You had to take everything he said there with a grain of salt. If you wanted to hear his actual opinions on things you needed to either listen to shareholder meeting or watch one of the many interviews he does.

Combined, these two things have created a problem now that he's purchased twitter. He's still using the platform for jokes and trolling, but he's also using it for all of his communication, and he's still an asshole. I think being an asshole is a problem when you're running a social media company, I mean that's why I've left reddit. You call him Machiavellian, and I think that's an apt description of Elon. Machiavellian describes him to the point that as a long time fan, I find myself wondering if his sudden shift to the right is him trying to get conservatives on board with actually doing something about climate change. But I think that might be too optimistic of me.

(Continuing the long proud tradition of someone asking for the opinions of a specific group, and someone not in that group replying anyways...)

...I think what happened is by 2022, Elon had fallen into such a bubble he genuinely convinced himself his alt-right ideas were super popular, and the only reason social media tended to lean left was because right-wing voices were being "surpressed". I think he honestly believed if he went free speech absolutist and removed all restrictions, right-wing voices would naturally dominate.

Of course, that didn't happen, because the right-wing is a minority that's shrinking every day. But instead of realizing he'd been wrong, he deluded himself into believing all the left-leaning folk had to be bots, because there's no way the far right's the minority, right? Right?!

The Alt-Right does not believe in the power of words. But they do know that others do. And the Alt-Right also seek power at any costs. So when Elon promises something, for him, these are just words to reach his goals. Because he knows others will believe him and that's all he needs. The meaning of the words is irrelevant, only the results matter. It's all about finding the correct "incantation" to get the desired outcome.

Head over to bluesky. It’s not a shit show.