On Wednesday, The Babylon Bee posted on Twitter its 1-hour interview with Elon Musk, in which the Twitter CEO discussed free speech, censorship, and his plans for the social media company with editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and publisher Seth Dillon.
When asked about his future goals for Twitter, Musk said he wants the platform to offer a wide range of services, including financial services.
Musk explained that financial services are “an important part of freedom.” Citing recent controversies over PayPal closing accounts belonging to some people on the right, Musk said it is wrong that a financial institution has the power to “stop people who disagree with them politically.”
Musk said since money is a “form of information,” It is important to enable the “freedom of flow of money.”
Musk intends to rebrand Twitter as “X,” a platform that will offer a “full array” of financial services and communications, including voice, video, and encrypted communications. He said his goal is to ensure that the actions the platform takes “strengthen the pillars of democracy and further civilization.”
When discussing Musk’s decision to begin releasing the Twitter Files, the Twitter CEO said he chose to release everything to “be as transparent as possible.” He explained that if he wasn’t willing to expose the things Twitter was doing wrong, “why should people believe us in the future?”
Since Musk took over the company last fall, Twitter engineers have been combing through code to make sure it is all “brought to light” and that there are no “hidden layers or anything.”
As an example, Musk said that last week, engineers discovered code that was first added in 2012 that included a list of words Twitter used to “evaluate tweets.” Any tweets that contained any of the words from that list would not “get amplified on the platform.”
