His past actions show he isn't a believer in free speech and that almost all his principles are transactional. An example of this transactional behavior is calling out Saudi Arabia for lack of free speech while owning twitter which is interesting because he didn't have much problem with SA when they held 4.x percent of Tesla a few years back.
His beliefs appear to be built on a sand, not rock.
>The economic prosperity that China has achieved is truly amazing, especially in infrastructure! I encourage people to visit and see for themselves.
Source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1410413958805270533
And never, ever a word about freedom of speech issues in China. We all know why.
He is praising the economic growth of China, which is a fact. It did grow a lot.
What would he say?
"The economic prosperity that China has achieved is truly amazing, despite lacking freedom of speech"??
If he has offered any criticisms of the CCP's relationship with free speech, I apologize for missing it. Otherwise, it's hard not to be cynical about people like him that claim to care deeply about freedom of expression while playing up business interests in countries that do not share such a value.
If he added "free speech", it would've meant that you could achieve good economic growth even without free speech.
I'm sure that's not the narrative anyone in the western world wants to go with.
Tesla is a public company and anyone can buy stock. What did you expect Elon Musk to do if Saudi billionaires buy stock?
what are you even expecting here? he should've called them out for lack of free speech when they owned tesla? was there some instigating event during that time period which he ignored more than every other public figure? (i don't think we expect all public figures to make annual condemnations of every nation that does anything we consider appropriate. do we?)
as far as i know, he was snarking at saudia arabia's involvement in twitter because they commented negatively on his buyout proposal.
I expect them to also live under the same sort of rules and regulations they would have the rest of us live under.
Being honest and not lying often would be nice too.