Leftists clutched their pearls all throughout Wednesday after billionaire Elon Musk called out Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, for her censorship policies within the company.
On Tuesday, after having purchased the social media platform, Musk expressed his misgivings about Twitter’s past practices when he openly criticized Gadde, who heads content moderation, over a report she spearheaded the effort to have the Hunter Biden laptop story banned.
“Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” tweeted Musk.
On Wednesday, Musk ratcheted the criticism up a notch when he tweeted a meme featuring Gadde on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2019 as a means to prove her “left-wing bias” by constantly citing “context.”
Musk also responded to a tweet from conservative activist Mike Cernovich alleging Twitter lawyer Jim Baker, former general counsel for the FBI, “personally arranged a meeting between the FBI and Michael Sussmann.
Musk’s tweets caught the ire of former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who accused Musk of “bullying” Gadde and directing trolls to attack her.
“Bullying is not leadership,” tweeted Costolo, prompting Musk to reply, “What are talking about? I’m just saying Twitter needs to be politically neutral.”
“What’s going on? You’re making an executive at the company you just bought the target of harassment and threats,” responded Costolo, who ran Twitter from 2010 to 2015.
As Breitbart News noted in 2020, Costolo has a history of issuing incendiary tweets, having previously said “me-first capitalists” who disagree with workplace political activism will be “the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution.”
Also on Wednesday, the New York Times ran an article alleging Elon Musk’s criticism of Gadde could possibly be in violation of the non-disparagement clause for the Twitter purchase while other outlets said that Gadde fell subject to racist, sexist insults.
However, Forbes noted the actual text of the agreement only says that Musk cannot issue disparaging statements about the merger.
“These few lines on Page 50 pertain to Musk tweeting about the merger, his deal with Twitter. Under this agreement, he isn’t supposed to go on Twitter and say nasty things about Agrawal or Gadde in connection to the merger. And, yeah, it’s pretty clear that his replies yesterday to Enjeti and Cernovich weren’t about the merger,” noted Forbes.
“With this one, sorry, folks: Musk’s safe from the SEC police, who obviously have a history with him,” it added.