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- The former CNN anchor Don Lemon says Elon Musk has canceled his Twitter talk show before its debut.
- Lemon says Musk, who courted him, didn't like the interview Lemon had just conducted with Musk.
- If you're surprised by this kind of behavior from Musk, you're not paying attention.
Elon Musk courted the former CNN anchor Don Lemon to start a talk show on Twitter. Lemon agreed, and Twitter/X bragged about it as part of its pivot to video.
Now it's not going to happen at all, Lemon says: He says Musk canceled the show — before it ever aired — shortly after Lemon interviewed him on Friday. Musk, you see, was going to be Lemon's first guest.
Twitter, which would like you to call it X, announced that "after careful consideration, X decided not to enter into a commercial partnership" with Lemon. (In January, it announced "a new content partnership" with Lemon.)
Musk added that the problem with Lemon — who, again, he courted last year — was that he wasn't good at hosting a show and "lacked authenticity."
Who could have possibly seen that coming?
Trick question!
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The truth is that anyone who has spent any time following Musk in recent years knows that the most consistent thing about Musk is that he's wildly inconsistent.
He says one thing one day, and reverses himself another.
Sometimes it's about relatively small stuff — like announcing that he's not going to ban a Twitter account tracking his private jet, then banning the Twitter account tracking his private jet, along with accounts of people who linked to that account.
Sometimes it's about really big stuff — like signing a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion so he can rid it of bots, then announcing that he's not going to do it because Twitter has too many bots.
And in Lemon's case, there's some very specific precedent for this.
Remember when Musk recruited the journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi to publish the Twitter Files — a series of stories that purported to expose malfeasance by Twitter's previous managers, sourced from Twitter's internal documents?
That was back in fall 2022 — something he prioritized immediately after buying Twitter (after bailing on his effort to bail on buying Twitter).
And then … Musk broke up with both writers: He first got angry at Weiss for criticizing his move to bar journalists (over the jet-tracking incident); he later fought with Taibbi over the fact that Taibbi publishes a newsletter on Substack. A few months after launching the Twitter Files, he announced he was ready to "move on."
So what I'm saying here is: Go ahead and work with Elon Musk if you want to. It's a free country!
Just don't be surprised if you end up with Leopards Eating Your Face.
March 13, 2024 — This story has been updated with comments from X and Elon Musk.