Mark Cuban Says Elon Musk’s ‘Biggest Power Play’ on X Is Letting Users Think They Have Free Speech

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

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

• Cuban has often 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.

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

The “Shark Tank” star weighed in on Musk’s ownership of X during an exchange with professional gamer Haralabos Voulgaris on the platform.

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

“Freedom of expression is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital public square where issues vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement in April 2022, when the acquisition was announced.

Elon Musk said he wants to improve Twitter by introducing “new features, open-sourcing algorithms to increase trust, defeating spambots, and authenticating all humans.”

But today’s X, Cuban said, is not what Musk initially promised.

“It’s as free as Elon wants it to be. He can bully. He can change the algorithm. He can suspend whoever he wants at any time,” Cuban wrote Sunday.

“He’s the ultimate arbiter of everything that happens here. And the biggest power play he has is making everyone believe that their speech is free, until he decides that it’s not, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

However, Cuba has not stopped using X.

“That’s why every time he calls me or insults me, I say something back. It’s funny,” Cuban said in his message to Voulgaris.

“And you know I always appreciate and respect our exchanges.”

This is not the first time Cuban has accused Musk of running X based on his own whims and fancies.

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

“When you write an algorithm — I haven’t written much, it’s been a long time — but when you write one, you can set the parameters of what you want to happen. And he certainly did that for the things he liked,” Cuban said, without providing evidence that Musk manipulated the algorithm.

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

According to Musk, Cuban was seeing more content from far-right accounts because the algorithm took into account Cuban’s frequent interactions with them. Cuban is known for responding to a wide variety of accounts on X.

Musk then posted another message in which he called Cuban a giant human-shaped turd.

Cuban had only one brief response to Musk: a series of heart and hand emojis.

In June, Cuban told Business Insider that he had no problem with Musk despite their heated exchanges over X.

Besides X, the two men have clashed over topics including corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and this year’s U.S. presidential election.

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

Representatives for Musk at X and Cuban did not immediately respond to BI’s requests for comment sent outside of normal business hours.

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