Last year on the Joe Rogan Experience, billionaire Elon Musk said that owning X was a “recipe for trouble.” Musk’s purchase of X in 2022, sparked all sorts of frenzy with it reportedly being one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history. But the Tesla CEO had his reasons for forking out $44 billion to buy the erstwhile Twitter and on a more recent appearance on JRE, he gave an insight into his motivation for making the pricey deal.

Even though X’s usage has dropped by 23% in the US, Musk’s X has created a strong platform for breaking news, fact-checking, and for the mainstream to gauge the sentiment around a particular development. Despite this, Musk’s decision to buy X remains controversial as the microblogging site still suffers from advertiser boycotts.

On the JRE episode #2223, Rogan pointed out, “What they were doing with social media by suppressing information and when you had a combined government effort like with what they were doing with the laptop story. You have 51 former Intelligence agents saying that ‘this is Russian disinformation take it off offline’ and Twitter complied.” In response, Musk opened up about why he brought X in the first place.

“The reason I bought it, because I was pretty attuned since I was like the most interacted with a user on Twitter before the acquisition. I had the most number of interactions of any account in the system. I was very attuned to like if they changed the system, I could tell immediately. And I’m like, ‘something weird is going on here,’ you know? So, I just got increasingly uneasy,” Musk said.

His concerns were solidified when Twitter took the unprecedented step of de-platforming a sitting president—Donald Trump. The decision made by the social media platform surely took aback Musk. As Rogan mentioned how Musk’s acquisition of X was a “pivotal moment in this very bizarre fight for the Freedom of information,” the billionaire dived further into his rationale behind purchasing the social media platform.

“If you don’t have freedom of speech, people cannot make an informed vote. They’re just being fed propaganda and there’s no freedom of speech, democracy is an illusion. So freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy that’s why freedom of speech is the First Amendment. Once you lose freedom of speech you lose democracy, game over. That’s why I bought Twitter,” he elaborated.

Back in November 2023, on the same podcast, Musk talked about how the platform was causing harm to society and how the purchase had affected him. “Well, it’s certainly a recipe for trouble, I suppose, or contention… I mean, this is going to sound somewhat melodramatic, but I was worried that it was having a corrosive effect on civilization, that it was just having a bad impact,” Musk said.

Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022 and rebranded it as X in July 2023. Wedbush Securities tech analyst Dan Ives said that Musk buying Twitter “remains a major head-scratcher” and that the social platform’s fair value was $25 billion, meaning Musk overpaid by quite a margin.

After his takeover, Musk caused controversy when he reduced the workforce by 75% and dismantled various prohibitive policies, which led to alienation from advertisers and subsequent financial loss. But this hasn’t deterred Musk from keeping hold of X.

Elon Musk reveals the current X/Twitter situation

Joe Rogan told Musk, “Well you didn’t do it no one else was going to do it because it wasn’t a financial winner it was kind of a crazy move….There’s also a concerted effort to suppress it. There’s a concerted effort with the advertisers.”

Musk then mentioned, “We had and still have um a massive advertiser boycott that was organized by a bunch of leftwing NGOs.” According to investment giant Fidelity, Twitter is worth almost 80% less than two years ago, which implies it is valued at just $9.4 billion, a massive downgrade from the $44 billion that Musk paid

However, through the introduction of other X-related services, such as X TV, Musk is trying his best to add more revenue streams to keep the company running. But his personal beef with Apple is getting in the way since XTV is still unavailable on the iOS store despite being available on other platforms such as the Google Play Store. Musk has made massive companies from the ground up, so he probably will find a way to turn X into a profitable business as well.