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Salman Rushdie has said he doesn’t believe that Elon Musk is a defender of free speech, adding that he would “love for him to be the first man on Mars”.
In a new interview, the British-Indian author talked about freedom of expression, where he was asked how he feels about the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla CEO and his platform X.
“Elon Musk doesn’t defend free expression. His social network curates the discourse of the extreme right. Appropriating a noble cause, such as freedom of expression, when what you do is the opposite is very dishonest,” Rushdie told El Pais at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia.
“I’m not a fan of Mr Musk. And I would love for him to be the first man on Mars.”
“So that he stays there…” asked the interviewer.
“Yes, let him go. If he likes it so much, then let him go,” Rushdie responded.
The Satanic Verses author then shared that he had met Musk a decade ago, where the tech mogul shared his plans to “get to Mars”.
“I once met him, in Los Angeles, 10 years ago. And he said that it would take seven years to get to Mars. Seven years have already passed, and I really want him to leave,” Rushie said.
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Rushdie also spoke about the anti-immigrant sentiment gaining traction in several countries, and that the values of tolerance and empathy are “weaker now than at any other time in my life”.
“I’m a double migrant, from India to England, from England to the United States. And, in my life, I’ve always tried to celebrate the more positive side of that. All that migration feeds culture. We live in an era of migration, a time in history when many people move around the planet for economic or political reasons,” he said.
“Isn’t the United States a nation of immigrants? Apart from Native Americans, everyone is a migrant. That’s been the case since the founding fathers. The great American myth is now said to be bad, evil. Even Elon Musk is from South Africa.”
He added what he foresaw taking place if governments succeeded in completely pushing immigrants out.
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“I think the world won’t stop having planes, ships. Movement will continue to happen; they cannot stop the world just because they don’t approve of it. Right now, we’re concerned about the issue of deportations in the United States, and Americans should be careful what they wish for,” he said.
“If they go ahead [and push people out], they’ll find that the price of food won’t go down, but rather, it’ll go up, because there will be no one to harvest the crops. The medical world will also be affected, because there will be fewer people working in hospitals. Absolutely every aspect of American life will be affected by deportations.”
The 77-year-old author is currently testifying in the trial of Hadi Matar, the man accused of attacking him during a public lecture on free speech at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state in August 2022.
“I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in,” he told the court, recalling lying on the stage. “My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.”
Matar, 27, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault. If convicted, he faces up to 25 years in prison.
