Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee claimed Elon Musk should be “prosecuted” and have limits on his free speech due to his strategic defense work with the government.
On MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” McNamee of Elevation Partners said the Tesla and SpaceX boss was “undermining” the federal government that he does business with by sharing his opinions on his X platform.
“You have somebody who runs a really strategic defense and aerospace projects for the federal government who’s actively undermining the government that’s paying him. And somewhere in that is a legal case that needs to be prosecuted,” McNamee said on Saturday’s show.
McNamee was responding to a hate speech watchdog’s report that found Musk guilty of spreading “false or misleading claims about the US election” through his posts on X, which had garnered “nearly 1.2 billion views.”
McNamee argued that Musk’s free speech rights should be limited because SpaceX has government defense contracts.
SpaceX has been a major partner for the US government in launching military satellites. Documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal in February revealed that SpaceX entered into a massive $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. in 2021.
“The critical element in thinking about Elon Musk is that, like any American, he has a right to his own opinion, and he has a right to express his opinion,” McNamee said.
“However, that right is not unlimited. He is under some special limitations that would not apply to normal people because his company, specifically Starlink and SpaceX are government contractors and, as such, he has obligations to the government that would, for any normal person, and should for him, require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security,” he concluded.
Musk filed a lawsuit last year against the hate speech watchdog, The Center for Countering Digital Hate, arguing the claims in the report were “misleading.” They claimed the nonprofit’s “scare campaign” cost the social media platform millions when advertisers fled.
A US judge threw out Musk’s lawsuit, saying it was “evident” that Musk’s X sued the CCDH because he didn’t like its criticism, and thought its research would hurt X’s image and scare advertisers away.
In a recent appearance on CNN, the watchdog’s CEO Imran Ahmed defended his firm’s report.
“The truth is that [Musk’s] been casting around for a reason to blame us for his own failings as a CEO, because we all know that when he took over, he put up the bat signal to racists, to misogynists, to homophobes, to anti-Semites, saying Twitter is now a free speech platform. He welcomed them back on,” Ahmed said on CNN last year.
Former President Trump announced last week he would appoint Musk to lead a government efficiency commission if elected in November.
“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government,” he said at the New York Economic Club last Thursday.
“I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk wrote on X in response. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”