Lesson of the day: Trusting Elon with your free speech can get you killed
If ever there was an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, Elon Musk had it on 13 May 2025.
That was when Donald "I saved MBS's ass" Trump personally introduced the world's richest free-speech absolutist to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.
MBS is best known to Washington Post readers as the man who ordered the brutal 2018 murder and dismemberment of that newspaper's columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
As The Washington Post reported in 2022, when Saudi Arabia became the lead foreign investor in Musk's Twitter takeover it gained "special access to confidential company information" on Twitter users. This was especially concerning given the Kingdom's "history of cracking down on dissidents on Twitter and other online platforms."
As owner of X in 2023, Musk remained conspicuously silent when Saudi Arabia took the extraordinary action of sentencing one of the Musk platform's users to death for a couple of tweets to a handful of followers.
Also of note: one of the Twitter users Saudi Arabia had arrested prior to financing Musk's acquisition was Turki Al-Jasser.
There's no indication that Musk used his May 2025 meeting with MBS to do anything but schmooze. Watching the video of that meeting, the idea that Musk might ask the Crown Prince not to execute X users doesn't appear to have entered his mind.
On June 14, Saudi Arabia executed Turki Al-Jasser
As ABC News reports:
According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Saudi authorities maintained that Al-Jasser was behind a social media account on X, formerly Twitter, that levied corruption allegations against Saudi royals. Al-Jasser was also said to have posted several controversial tweets about militants and militant groups.
CPJ's program director Carlos Martínez de la Serna condemned the execution and said the lack of accountability in the wake of the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018 allows for continued persecution of journalists in the kingdom.
“The international community’s failure to deliver justice for Jamal Khashoggi did not just betray one journalist,” he said, adding it had “emboldened de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to continue his persecution of the press.”
As Middle East Eye reports, the Kingdom saw fit to announce the execution of Al-Jasser on X itself.
Saudi Arabia is now bankrolling Musk's poisonous Grok AI
As I wrote in May prior to the Trump-Musk visit to Riyadh:
For all his talk of free-speech, Musk still routinely censors political voices at the request of dictators and leaders in countries he does business with.... Maybe that's why Saudi Arabia and other Arab states keeping writing multibillion-dollar checks to him.
In March 2025, Elon Musk merged X with xAI, combining "toxic Twitter" with the AI company that's currently pumping tons of formaldehyde into a Memphis neighborhood long-plagued by environmental racism.
At the time, Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal tweeted that his companies were the second-largest investors in the new xAI: "the value of our investments is expected to reach between $4-$5 billion... and the meter is running."
It seems that the Saudis are unfazed by what the unhinged, apartheid-educated, illegal-drug-abusing, Nazi-saluting billionaire allows to happen on X.
Meanwhile, Musk remains equally unconcerned when the Saudis respond to the free speech he promotes on X with arrests and executions.
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P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
Further reading:
Saudi Arabia’s Useful Idiot
Musk’s admission about Twitter’s falling value would alarm most investors. But $1.9B is chump change for the Saudis—a small cost to kill Twitter.
Richard Hine
The X-ecutions Begin
In July 2023, a Saudi Arabian Twitter user with only 9 followers was sentenced to death.
Richard Hine
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