Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk poked fun Friday at democratic socialist New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, telling her to “stop hitting on me.”
On Monday, Twitter said it had reached an agreement for Musk to buy the platform for $44 billion, CNN reported. While many free speech advocates have hailed Musk’s decision as a good news for free expression, plenty of leftists have claimed that under Musk’s ownership, Twitter will become a haven for “hate speech.”
Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, took to Twitter on Friday to express concern over an “explosion of hate crimes.”
“Tired of having to collectively stress about what explosion of hate crimes is happening bc some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
Tired of having to collectively stress about what explosion of hate crimes is happening bc some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 29, 2022
That prompted a response from Musk.
“Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy,” he wrote.
Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy ☺️
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2022
In a follow-up post, Ocasio-Cortez claimed she was actually referring to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“I was talking about Zuckerberg but ok,” she said.
🤷🏽♀️ like I said, ego problems https://t.co/IpyCkMadP8
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 30, 2022
“Like I said, ego problems,” she also said.
Musk has said he wants to tap into Twitter’s “tremendous potential,” according to Fox News.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement after news broke that he was buying Twitter.
“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”