Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of Twitter has the whole world going mad. Celebrities and politicians are threatening to shut down their accounts, and now the world’s 2nd richest man, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has jumped into the fray with a pretty wild accusation: Musk bought the company to help Chinese communism.
While Bezos himself didn’t appear to have come up with the conspiracy, he promoted a tweet from New York Times reporter Mike Forsythe breaking down potential reasons Musk may cater his new private platform to Xi Jinping and his commie cronies.
According to Jeff Bezos, Musk is held hostage by the current Chinese regime because Tesla relies on China for both their massive car market as wall as to produce all of their batteries for their electric vehicles. Both of these facts are absolutely true.
Bezos then assumes that China will leverage Tesla’s reliance on them to finally censor Twitter, a platform they banned in 2009 because they couldn’t censor government dissent on it effectively.
Admittedly this is concerning, especially coupled with Elon’s tweet from just last year praising the country he has spent years cozying up to. Musk tweeted: “The economic prosperity that China has achieved is truly amazing, especially in infrastructure! I encourage people to visit and see for themselves.”
Musk also predicted China surpassing the United States as the world economic leader, saying in December that, “China is probably going to have an economy two to three times the size of the United States. Tesla has a good relationship with China, and I don’t mean to endorse everything that China does any more than I would, say, endorse everything the United States does, or any country.”
Of course, Bezos’s beef with Elon Musk is only half the story. Specifically, his concern about Chinese government involvement in the business.
Amazon also has a huge amount of business in China. So much so, in fact, that they removed the comment section from the Chinese version of their website after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) requested they take it down to avoid people using it to insult the government.
Amazon has also been liked directly to China’s Uyghur concentration camps.
In 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said Amazon was one of several companies who were “directly or indirectly benefiting from the use of Uyghur workers outside Xinjiang through abusive labor transfer programs as recently as 2019.”
An Amazon spokesperson responded to the claim, saying, “Amazon complies with the laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which it operates…We take allegations of human rights abuses seriously, including those related to the use or export of forced labor.”
When you break it all down, it looks like two absurdly rich people pointing fingers at each other while they are both just as guilty of selling out their alleged principles to the same Chinese government. Do you think Elon Musk will defend free speech from communist censors or will he bow down to them to help his businesses?
