Mark Cuban says Elon Musk's 'biggest power play' on X is letting users think they have free speech

• X isn’t the “bastion of free speech” everyone thinks it is, says Mark Cuban.

• The “Shark Tank” star said the platform is “only as free as Elon wants it to be.

• Cuban has frequently accused Musk of running X based on the latter’s own whims.

Mark Cuban doesn’t think social media platform X is as free as Elon Musk says it is.

“I know everyone thinks this platform is a bastion of free speech. I see the opposite,” Cuban wrote in an X post on Sunday.

The “Shark Tank” star gave his opinion of Musk’s ownership of X while engaging with professional gambler, Haralabos Voulgaris on the platform.

Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, before renaming it X in July 2023.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in statement in April 2022, when the acquisition was announced.

Musk said that he wanted to improve Twitter by introducing “new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

But the X of today, Cuban said, isn’t what Musk initially promised.

“It’s only as free as Elon wants it to be. He can intimidate. He can alter the algorithm. He can suspend anyone he wants at any time,” Cuban wrote on Sunday.

“He is the ultimate arbiter of everything on here. And the biggest power play is him making everyone think their speech is free speech Until he decides it isn’t, and there is nothing any of us can do about it.”

Cuban, however, hasn’t stopped using X.

“Which is why whenever he calls me out or calls me names, I’ll throw something back at him. It’s fun,” Cuban said in his post to Voulgaris.

“And you know I always enjoy and respect our back and forth.”

This isn’t the first time Cuban has accused Musk of running X based on his own whims and fancies.

Last month, Cuban said in an interview on “The Daily Show” that Musk might have adjusted X’s algorithm to suit his own preferences.

“When you write an algorithm — I haven’t written a lot, it’s been a while — but when you write one, you get to set the parameters of what you want to see happen. And he certainly has done that to the things he likes,” Cuban said, without providing evidence of Musk’s manipulation of the algorithm.

Cuban’s accusation spurred a response from Musk, who wrote just days later in an X post that his platform is open-source, unlike other platforms.

Cuban, Musk said, was seeing more content from right-wing accounts because the algorithm was taking into account Cuban’s frequent interactions with them. Cuban has been known to respond to a wide variety of accounts on X.

Musk later followed up with another post that called Cuban a giant turd in human form.

Cuban only had a brief response for Musk: a series of heart hand emojis.

In June, Cuban told Business Insider that he has no issues with Musk despite their heated exchanges on X.

Besides X, the pair have gone head-to-head on topics like corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and the US presidential election this year.

“I have fun sparring with Elon. He likes to troll and so do I,” Cuban said in June.

Representatives for Musk at X and Cuban didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

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