This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 6 episode of “Ayman.”
Two years ago, when billionaire Elon Musk bought what was once called Twitter, he vowed to keep it a nonbiased platform. In fact, that was his mission statement. Just days after purchasing the platform, Musk said, “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
It was a message he repeated frequently in interviews after purchasing the platform. “The goal of new Twitter is to be as fair and even-handed as possible. So not favoring any political ideology,” Musk told Fox News. But that quickly turned out to be a hollow sentiment.
Musk met with Trump, who just so happened to be seeking a cash infusion to help his campaign.
Instead, Musk used his immense influence on his own platform to tell his followers to vote for Republicans in the 2022 midterms. He also voiced his support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary.
But there was one prominent Republican whom Musk wasn’t a fan of: Donald Trump. Musk had previously said the former president was “too old” and that he should “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
As you can imagine, Trump didn’t take to that advice very well. In 2022, during a rally in Alaska, Trump addressed Musk’s comments, telling the crowd that Musk said he voted for Trump in 2016.
Trump escalated the feud when he took to his own social media website, Truth Social, and claimed Musk came to the White House begging for his help on his projects. “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Trump wrote in 2022. The former president would also go on to savagely mock Musk’s notoriously glitch-filled campaign launch for DeSantis on X.
But after the campaigns of Musk’s preferred candidates, DeSantis and later Vivek Ramaswamy, went down in flames, the billionaire planned a spring trip to Mar-a-Lago. In March, he met with Trump, who just so happened to be seeking a cash infusion to help his campaign.








