World’s richest man and fair-weather “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk says bad press over his descent into the dark side of MAGA has put him at risk of being murdered.
“With their relentless hit pieces, legacy mainstream media are actively encouraging the assassination of @realDonaldTrump and now me,” the Tesla CEO said in an X post overnight, with a screenshot of an article by Der Spiegel describing him as “enemy number two” in the U.S. elections.
“Dramatically increasing my risk of being assassinated and engaging in politics are not what I want to do,” Musk added in an accompanying video clip from his speech at a Republican town hall event in Pennsylvania on Sunday.
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“I do not have a death wish, but the stakes are so high that I really feel I have no choice but to do it, and that’s the reason,” he said at the weekend.
Musk’s latest late-night posting session also comes not long after suggesting he’d be facing jail time in the event Kamala Harris wins out over Donald Trump at the presidential election in November.
“If [Trump] loses, I’m f---ed,” he not-so-jokingly told Tucker Carlson in an Oct. 7 interview. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Do you think? Will I see my children? I don’t know.”
While the Space X founder’s wider claim, that it’d be his criticism of Harris that lands him in the slammer, would appear to be entirely baseless, the prospect of Musk facing some sort of legal consequences for his conduct during the presidential race is perhaps less remote than it might once have seemed.
Lawyers have recently suggested that Musk’s $1-million-per-day voter lottery prize represents a “clearly illegal vote buying scheme,” with further election interference concerns over allegations one of Musk’s PACs has perhaps illegally used fake Harris campaign sites to push disinformation about the Democratic candidate and her policies.
All that above and beyond Musk’s prospects of a five-year prison sentence if world champion boxer Imane Khelif emerges victorious from her French civil suit against him and other right-wing public figures for cyberbullying her about her gender during this year’s Olympic Games in Paris.