After acquiring Twitter, which he renamed X, billionaire Elon Musk faced some serious backlash pertaining to his handling of the platform. Some people even questioned his business sense, which longtime UFC commentator Joe Rogan took offense to, deeming those critics nothing more than just “idiots.”

A deal that took almost an entire year to finalize finally came to fruition in October 2022, as Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. To do so, though, Musk borrowed $13 billion from 7 banks, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. Per the Wall Street Journal, it “turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis.” 

In his bid to acquire Twitter, Elon Musk said he would quintuple the platform’s revenue by 2028, increasing annual earnings to $26.4 billion. However, the platform’s value has seen a tremendous dip in the past couple of years, with a current market value of around $9.4 billion. Despite this and the Wall Street Journal’s report, Joe Rogan told Musk: “Thank you so much for buying Twitter. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think you changed the course of history.”

“We were headed down a path of censorship and control of narratives that was unprecedented,” Rogan added, mentioning the Hunter Biden laptop controversy from 2020. Three weeks before the 2020 Presidential Elections, the New York Post published a front-page story with emails from Hunter’s laptop that he’d given for repairs. The story alleged that the emails showed corruption by Joe Biden, and shortly after the story broke, Twitter and other social media platforms blocked links to it. But this case wasn’t the only thing that prompted Elon Musk to purchase Twitter.

As “the most interacted-with user on Twitter before the acquisition,” Musk claimed that he could feel a shift taking place on Twitter. “When they de-platformed the sitting President (Donald Trump), that was just insane.” After Trump lost the 2020 Presidential Elections, his supporters stormed the US Capitol in January 2021 during the formal counting of electoral votes. At the time, Twitter management believed Trump’s tweets played a role in inciting the attack and violence, and they permanently suspended his account.

Referring to all this, Musk told Joe Rogan: “The Twitter acquisition was like, ‘Man, if I don’t do this, I think we’re sc—ed.” Rogan said, “If you didn’t do it, no one was gonna do it. Because it wasn’t a financial winner.” Musk replied, “It was a crazy move. The thing was way overpriced. Long-term, I think, we can ultimately make it a win for investors. But this is a hard way to make a living.”

“We still have a massive advertiser boycott that was organized by a bunch of left-wing NGOs,” he added. However, Joe Rogan couldn’t help but say, “If you didn’t do it, no one would have. And here’s the hilarious narrative that I keep hearing from idiots: ‘Elon’s a bad businessman. Twitter is worth 400% less than when he bought it.'” The UFC color commentator expressed this on JRE episode #2223 when Elon Musk appeared as a guest for a record 5th time. “No, it wasn’t worth that in the first place.” 

There are several criticisms regarding X’s operations under Elon Musk’s ownership, which start from misinformation and hate speech to account suspensions of nearly a dozen employees on the platform. These criticisms claim that the Tesla CEO has devalued the platform after he took over, seeing as it’s market value has significantly dropped. So, was this a bad business decision from Musk?

Well, Joe Rogan doesn’t think so because he also wanted people to take the advertiser issues that the billionaire had in the recent past. “It wasn’t worth $44 billion, you f—ing morons! Wrong. And also, you’re not taking into account the advertiser boycott. That’s total bullsh-t,” Joe Rogan added. Since Musk’s takeover in 2022, Twitter (rather, X) has lost half its advertising revenue as over 500 advertisers stopped spending on the platform.

Stop Toxic Twitter – a coalition of civil rights and civil society groups – encourages advertisers to demand a safer space on Twitter for their brands. But when Elon Mush reportedly failed to uphold community standards and content moderation, they wrote an open letter to the platform’s top 20 advertisers, asking them to “cease all advertising on Twitter globally.” This boycott is still ongoing, contributing to X’s revenue loss.

But is losing money really an issue for Elon Musk? Well, it’s apparently not, and he made that crystal clear during a 2023 interview.

Elon Musk isn’t giving up free speech for money

Elon Musk has been a vocal user of his own platform as well, and that has rubbed many advertisers the wrong way. When he sat down with CNBC in May 2023 to discuss this issue, he remained very unapologetic. The 53-year-old is a staunch supporter of freedom of speech, and as a result, there have been times when people who wanted to buy Tesla cars shied away from doing so solely because of the vocal nature of Musk’s tweets. But that didn’t matter to the richest person on earth.

Despite X facing problems like reduced expenditure from advertisers, a diminishing number of users, backlash for the major rebranding of the platform, and dipping numbers when it comes to usage of the platform in the US, Musk couldn’t care enough. “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” Elon Musk stated.

What do you think about Joe Rogan backing Elon Musk? Do you feel the same? Drop your comments below.