Elon Musk says he faces "quite significant" risk of being shot for promoting free speech

The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk said the risk of him being shot is "quite significant", amid the radical changes he is making in the operations of the social media giant.

Speaking at an extensive space discussion on Saturday about the free speech changes he has made to Twitter, and the release of internal communications from 2020 about what caused Twitter to suppress the story on Hunter Biden's laptop, Musk said it is not hard for anybody to kill him.

He said: "Frankly the risk of something bad happening or even being shot is quite significant. I'm not going to be doing any open-air car parades, let me put it that way.

"It's not that hard to kill me if somebody wanted to, so hopefully they don't, "Musk said.

Throughout the roughly two-hour discussion, Elon Musk stressed the importance of free speech and his plans for the platform, Fox News Reports.

"Throughout history, free speech has been highly unusual, not common. So we have to fight really hard to keep that because it's such a rare thing and it's by no means something that's the default." 

"Controlled speech is the default, not free speech, "Musk said.

The discussion came on the heels of journalist Matt Taibbi's publication of the internal communications among Twitter's top executives, revealing that the social media platform suspended and censored users who commented on the Hunter Biden laptop story, published by New York Post.

"Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’

"They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography," Taibbi tweeted.

Musk further said on Saturday that the files show that in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential elections, Twitter "was acting like an arm of the" Democratic National Committee. He also hinted at the release of more files shortly.

"We’re just gonna put all the information out there and try to get a clean slate. We will be iteratively better and it will force other media companies to also be more truthful or else they’ll lose their readership," Musk said.

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