Embracing the Musk doctrine: A global champion for unfiltered free speech

What I admire most about Elon Musk is not his wealth, his IQ or his technological and scientific achievements. It’s his approach to free speech.

How many of us can honestly say to all those who would censor us: get lost? Or as Musk said in a November interview with financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin: “Go fk yourself”.

Musk had been asked for his views on major corporations withholding advertising from his company X because they consider his views inappropriate: “If somebody’s trying to blackmail me with advertising, go fk yourself”.

Much of his invective was directed at Disney chief executive Bob Iger, whose company reported mass cancellations following Musk’s comments.

With more than 165 million followers on X, Musk has influence, which he has been wielding with increasing vigour. Fans were in raptures, re-posting the Sorkin interview, with some calling the “free speech absolutist” the bravest man alive.

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How many of us exercise our right to freedom of expression? Do we write or say whatever we like? A posthumous compilation of the writings of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko carries the title, I Write What I Like.

That was the name of a column Biko wrote for a South African Students’ Organisation newsletter under the pseudonym, Frank Talk.

The use of a pseudonym indicates Biko did not really feel free to write what he liked.

This was brought home when he was murdered in police custody in September 1977. Biko was immensely brave in his outspokenness, as was an earlier brilliant struggle orator, Robert Sobukwe.

Attempts to stifle free speech follow us from the cradle to the grave.

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As 18th-century French philosopher JeanJacques Rousseau said in The Social Contract: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

The plight of the richest person on the planet cannot be compared with those of South African struggle icons who died fighting for freedom.

Yet what they have in common is a refusal to be silenced.

The name Harry Gwala may not be familiar, although a football stadium in Pietermaritzburg is named after him.

A fierce ANC local leader in the ’80s and ’90s, he once publicly toyed with the idea of death in my family, at a time when the area was notorious for political killings.

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But in 1994 I wrote a column in his defence (“No friends of Harry, but …”) after the governing party tried to censor him.

The right of people to tell their truths is something I was passionate about long before becoming a reporter in 1971.

It is a compulsion that landed this newspaper in a protracted defamation case which we won in the Constitutional Court (The Citizen vs McBride, 2011), asserting the right to speak the truth about the past.

Watching the Musk/Sorkin interview, I was reminded of long-ago inspirational conversations with playwright HWD “Cake” Manson who preached: “You have to fight to keep alive.”

Although he was remarkably strong physically, he was referring not to fisticuffs but the fight not to be silenced; to keep alive that voice inside you.

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Musk, who was bullied at school and at home, is leading that fight globally.