On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel returned for his second late-night show since his COVID hiatus, and the comedian still sounded a bit hoarse—but that didn’t stop him from going after Tesla CEO and edgelord Elon Musk.
“Speaking of babies, Elon Musk says that if his deal to buy Twitter goes through, he will reverse the ban on our infant former president, Donald Trump,” explained Kimmel.
Indeed, during remarks at the Financial Times’ Future of the Car conference, Musk explained his reasoning thusly: “Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam accounts… I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake, because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.” (What it did do, of course, is prevent Trump from inflaming an insurrection or dominating the news cycle.)
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“I would reverse the permanent ban,” Musk, who’s made a $44 billion offer to purchase Twitter and would act as its CEO, continued. “I don’t own Twitter yet. So this is not like a thing that will definitely happen, because what if I don’t own Twitter?”
Kimmel, naturally, was not impressed with the world’s richest man’s rationale.
“Oh, good, we have the part-time DJ who makes flamethrowers and cars that fart in charge of morality now,” cracked Kimmel. “The guy who named his kids Roman numerals will make sure they don’t do anything foolish.”
Ever since his Twitter bid, Musk has been very accommodating of far-right trolls on the platform and hostile to liberals, signal-boosting the likes of Mike Cernovich, a man best known for spreading the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory (the false claim that Democrats were running a pedophilia ring out of a D.C. pizza shop, which prompted a gunman to fire at the establishment), and Benny Johnson, who transformed into a far-right pundit after being fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarizing countless articles.
