Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter (now X), has admitted that his posts on the social network could have financially harmed the company. This revelation came to light during a statement related to a defamation lawsuit filed against him last year by Ben Brody, a 22-year-old user who claims that Musk unjustly implicated him in a conspiracy theory.
During the deposition, collected by The Huffington Post, Musk was questioned about his acquisition of Twitter and its impact on the use of the platform, and he claimed that his posting habits “really didn’t change before and after the acquisition.” However, he admitted that this could have harmed Twitter more than benefited it. “I’ve probably done… may have done more to financially harm the company than to help it,” Musk confessed.
The defamation lawsuit against Musk stems from a series of tweets he posted last summer. In these posts, the billionaire spread a conspiracy theory that wrongly linked Brody to a clash between the Proud Boys, a far-right American group, and an antifascist group in Oregon, United States.
Despite the controversy, Musk stated that his comment did not attract much attention, as he made that connection in a response to one of his tweets (already deleted). “Responses receive 100 times less attention than a main tweet,” he pointed out during the statement.
In addition, Musk expressed his belief that Brody was not significantly affected by the false conspiracy theory he helped spread, stating the following: “People are attacked all the time in the media, on the internet, on social media, but it is rare for that to actually have a significant negative impact on their life.”
But that’s not all. In his statement, Musk also admitted to using a secondary account under the alias @ermnmusk, where he pretended to be his young son, and which was discovered by Motherboard and other media outlets last year. The revelation adds another layer of controversy to the ongoing legal proceedings involving the owner of Twitter.
