Less than a year after getting fired from his longtime CNN gig for pissing off his bosses, Don Lemon recently revealed that he’s been … fired from his latest gig for pissing off his new boss. The gig this time? A solo-hosted online show in partnership with X, formerly Twitter. The boss? None other than Elon Musk, who agreed to sit down as The Don Lemon Show’s first interviewee on March 8.
The contract between Musk and Lemon—although it went unsigned—would have encompassed a revenue-sharing agreement between the two, plus some reportedly luxurious kickbacks for Lemon and highly produced video clips for X. The company had desperately courted the post-CNN Lemon for months. According to the Wall Street Journal, CEO-in-name Linda Yaccarino had put the Lemon deal front and center in her efforts to lure advertisers back to the video-prioritizing social network, whose far-right turn under Musk’s ownership has wiped out ad revenue.
So why did Musk scuttle the deal? Come check out “the conversation that everyone is talking about,” at least according to Lemon.
Before we get to the topics of controversy, it’s worth recounting how Lemon initially approached this interview, which was filmed at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory. From the jump, Lemon allowed Musk full liberty to parrot all sorts of fantastic, eyebrow-raising claims without even the slightest pushback: that Twitter is the “No. 1 source of news in the world” (that’s still Facebook, despite its hostility toward publishers), that Twitter’s “improved” algorithm is seeing “record usage” (as Alex Kantrowitz has reported in Slate, the number of app users has dropped significantly), that “old-school Twitter” would suppress right-wing accounts “10 times more” than it did left-wing ones (if anything, Twitter’s pre-Musk algorithm favored right-leaning accounts, despite banning many neo-Nazis and white supremacists). These remarks often came in response to some pathetically softball questions from Lemon: “You are in charge of an incredible platform, Elon. How do you feel that’s going?” “Are you putting out a flying car?” “How do you relax?”
But Lemon adjusted tactics about halfway through, pressing Musk on the mogul’s most concerning actions and statements, albeit with mixed results. First came the ask on Musk’s reported ketamine abuse, which the Tesla CEO called a “private” question before admitting to posting about the drug time and again “because I thought it could help other people”—then recommending that people diagnosed with depression take ketamine instead of SSRIs. (Musk has often claimed, without evidence, that traditional mental health medications “zombify” their users; Lemon didn’t probe further.)
Lemon was much more persistent when it came to Musk’s repeated endorsements of the racist, antisemitic “great replacement theory”—i.e., that shadowy figures, implied to be Jewish people, work to take in nonwhite immigrants so as to supplant white people. Musk tried to brush this all off by saying he doesn’t “subscribe to that,” then pivoting to baseless claims that there’s “a simple incentive to increase Democratic voters” by welcoming immigrants, including undocumented ones—even though, as Lemon pointed out, undocumented immigrants cannot vote and do not actually do so in significant numbers.
But eventually Musk bit and put forth another bizarre conspiracy: that because the 2020 census included undocumented residents in “blue states,” those states get an “increased number of House seats” that they wouldn’t otherwise have, as well as advantages in the Electoral College. In actuality, the Census Bureau likely missed a “substantial share” of noncitizen immigrants in 2020, per NPR, thanks to intimidating rhetoric from the Trump administration. Lemon didn’t mention that point, but he did correctly bring up that the Electoral College overwhelmingly advantages lesser-populated, redder states. Musk’s response to that? “I think that statement is true, but what I said is also true.” Huh?
That wasn’t Lemon’s last question about Musk’s increasingly vehement racism. When Lemon brought up Musk’s previous boosting of a tweet that referred to an “invasion” at the southern border, and mentioned that such language had been used by far-right terrorists like the 2019 El Paso shooter, Musk brushed it off, saying, “If I quote something, that doesn’t mean I believe everything it’s saying. It’s just something I think people should consider.” Then, while addressing the spread of antisemitic caricatures on Twitter, complete with disturbing examples from Twitter Blue subscribers, Musk kept insisting that “we only delete things that are illegal” (not true) and that no one actually sees those antisemitic tweets (also not true, not least because … Musk himself boosts a lot of hateful posts and sentiments).
Where Lemon appeared most insistent in pushing back against Musk’s nonsense was in the subject of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Lemon prodded his guest on his statements that DEI programs are “killing people” by “lowering standards” for women and nonwhite job applicants. Musk kept attempting to reframe his statement as a hypothetical and something that “could”/“will” happen in the future. (Though he’s already tweeted that airplane companies prioritizing “DEI hiring over your safety” is “actually happening,” there’s no evidence for these ridiculous claims.) For the rest of the talk, Musk continued to fall back on pablum about how there will be “replies” and Community Notes from users passing judgment on their convo, and that society should “move on” from correcting for historic inequities in race and gender. (“When you stop caring about people’s skills and integrity, and you start focusing on race and gender instead …” he said, pausing and trailing off.)
So … what did we learn from these two, and this sorry spectacle? Well, it may have been a useful exercise in hopefully dispensing, once and for all, any supposition that Elon “Free Speech” Musk is actually interested in advancing that democratic principle. If Don Lemon brings up things that Musk himself has posted? That’s censorship. But if Musk cancels an agreement with Lemon, after his company spent a full year wining and dining the anchor, because his feelings were hurt? That’s … free speech, apparently.
Maybe it’s better for Lemon that he has now severed ties with Twitter—by all metrics, the interview did not garner many views anyway. So it goes.
