Elon Musk has appeared to short-circuit for more than a minute when asked in an interview why people need his X platform – formerly Twitter, until he bought it and sacked half of its staff.

Musk started with “Yeah why is that important?” before rambling about trillions of cells and synapses in our bodies, then “the why of it, I mean, I guess”, then postulated it is to “increase our understanding of the universe” and “the meaning of life”, before appearing to give in and asking his interviewer, “why is anything important?”:

An apparently real reason is to push far-right narratives. Since the Hitler-saluting Musk’s take-over turned Twitter into X, the platform has been shown to prioritise and amplify extremist right-wing material, while its own ‘Grok’ AI system has admitted that it spreads Islamophobic fake news.

The Musk ‘glitch’ is reminiscent of a similar collapse on the part of his fellow far-right billionaire Peter Thiel‘s reaction when asked whether he wanted the human race to survive, except perhaps in Musk’s case the reason he doesn’t ‘say the quiet part out loud’ is because he can’t.

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Nikhil Kamath

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.