Elon Musk forgets about freedom of expression by sharing his vision of the future to China’s censors

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who considers himself a strong defender of freedom of expression, has shared his vision about how technology can guarantee the future of humanity in a column of the official publication of the China Cyberspace Administration (ACC)Has revealed Bloomberg. It is, a priori, unimportant news, especially considering that Musk has already spoken on many occasions about this matter, if it were not for the fact that he has contributed, specifically, to one of the main Chinese agencies. responsible for censoring audiovisual content in the country.

It is, therefore, contradictory that one of the most important technology entrepreneurs in the world, and who is continually defending freedom of expression, publishes an opinion in an agency that works by censoring the content of other media. In fact Musk wanted to buy twitter so that each user can express their opinion freely and without censorship.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, in addition to censoring, also supervises and controls the data security of Chinese multinationalssuch as Tecent or Alibaba.

Elon Musk, however, might have a reason for agreeing to submit his opinion for publication on how technology can change the future of humanity: maintain good ties with China. Although it is, again, contradictory to his thoughts. And it is that the tycoon warned a few weeks ago of “a bad feeling” on the economy that could undoubtedly affect Tesla as well.

In fact, and according to reports from Reutersthe CEO of Tesla and SpaceX asked a few weeks ago to pause all hiring and raised reduce Tesla’s current workforce by around 10% to deal with possible poor results in the next fiscal quarter.

For Elon Musk there is no freedom of expression that is worth when it comes to business

Maintaining a good relationship with the country, which has helped make Tesla even more successful, seems crucial for the tycoon. One of the lines that can be read in the aforementioned column proves it. “I also welcome more like-minded Chinese partners to join us in exploring clean energy, artificial intelligence, human-machine collaboration and space exploration to create a future worth looking forward to.”

Elon Musk, precisely, has not been the only manager to strengthen ties with China for convenience. He has too Mark Zuckerbergg, CEO of Meta, a company owned by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among others, as well as Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Both, however, have not been —at least publicly— such defenders of freedom of expression, nor have they attacked other tycoons, companies or users for, apparently, limit the possibility that anyone can say what they want. At least not like Elon Musk has done for the past few months.