WATCH: CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan Calls BS On Musk Excuse For Suspending Him in Twitter Purge — Says ‘I Poked The Billionaire’
CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan called BS on Elon Musk’s rationale for banning him as part of the Thursday Night Massacre Twitter purge, claiming he was suspended because “I poked the billionaire.”
On Thursday night, Musk began issuing permanent suspensions for a group of journalists who have been critical of his tenure as Twitter CEO, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan. The move resulted in a blistering backlash on Twitter, and was followed by a late-night attempt by Musk to clean things up in a Twitter Spaces interview.
Musk claimed the accounts were suspended for “doxxing” because the journalists in question shared information about the @ElonJet account he suspended after promising he never would do that. He abruptly ended the interview when he was challenged by one of the banned journalists, who pointed out that what he described was not, in fact, “doxxing.”
On Friday morning’s edition of CNN This Morning, co-anchors Kaitlan Collins and Don Lemon asked O’Sullivan to explain his side of the story. O’Sullivan told them none of the journalists did what Musk accused them of, and suggested that they were targeted for criticizing Musk:
KAITLAN COLLINS: Elon Musk said, quote, They posted my exact real-time location. Did you do that?
DONIE O’SULLIVAN: Now, that’s just entirely false. And from what we can see, the other journalists who have been suspended as well also did not post his precise live location.
DON LEMON: What did you do, Donie?
DONIE O’SULLIVAN: This all this all goes back… I poked the billionaire. This all goes back to a few days ago when there’s this account that tracks the location using publicly available information of his plane. And he kicked that off Twitter. He changed the rules to make it against Twitter’s rules. And we were reporting on that. We were reporting on the shutdown yesterday and late last night. Last night, around , 8 p.m. colleague Oliver Darcy texted me to say you’ve been suspended from Twitter.
DON LEMON: Yeah. So you really have, that wasn’t joking, was serious. What did you do? You just simply reported on Twitter and Elon Musk.
DONIE O’SULLIVAN: We did reporting. I look, I mean, I think it’s important to point out here, Twitter is a private company. It can do whatever that at once. Okay. You know, when it kicked off Donald Trump back in January 2021, many people said, look, Trump has performed Twitter. As we spoke about yesterday, the First Amendment does not apply to Twitter. But coming from the guy who is the free speech absolutist, who says he wants this to be a beacon of free expression, it is quite something to see him banning journalists who all just happen to cover him critically. But I would also say fairly.
POPPY HARLOW: You obviously have a unique perspective because you’ve been reporting on him and this and you’ll continue to. You’re also in the middle of it in a weird way that journalists don’t want to be, don’t want to become the story. The question is, what levers are there to pull? Now, you heard what the German foreign minister I think that was said. What will businesses do? What will media companies that advertise on it do, CNN says they are reevaluating our relationship with Twitter in that statement. What will big advertisers like an Apple do?
DONIE O’SULLIVAN: I mean, I think our colleague Oliver, who’s been reporting this out this morning, also said that that is something to watch. You know, I think one thing that’s really important to stress here is I have a platform, I’m on CNN. Wit’ you guys right now. We are in the privileged position really as journalists, where if we want to quit Twitter, we’re still going to be able to report and do our jobs. For a lot of independent freelance journalists around the world. You know, the reality is they have to be on Twitter because that is where editors and publishers will see their work and might hire them. I worry about the chilling effect that this might have on those reporters, particularly when you think that Musk also owns these other companies, Tesla and SpaceX. What if you’re in Germany or elsewhere and you’re reporting on maybe poor working conditions? Is he going to come and just stamp down because he says, oh, that’s against the rules.
Watch above via CNN This Morning.
