(FiveNation.com)- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was urged to “stop flirting” with billionaire Elon Musk in a cringe-worthy social media encounter Friday after she attacked an unnamed “billionaire with an ego issue” on Twitter.
It was the New York progressive who wrote in a tweet on Friday that she was “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,”
Musk’s responded with the following Tweet: “Stop hitting on me. I’m pretty shy.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded with a snarky tweet that has since been deleted, claiming she was making fun of another billionaire, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“I was referring to Zuckerberg, but that’s fine,” the New York lawmaker responded.
Neither Musk nor Zuckerberg responded to the tweet.
Ocasio- Cortez’s initial tweet, in which she mentioned Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, may have alluded to a 2019 Politico investigation, which alleged that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosted a clandestine meal with Carlson. Thiel, who has been a mentor to Zuckerberg for many years, was one of the company’s early investors.
Theil and Musk’s careers have been running parallel since the launch of Paypal in 2000, even though they appear to have a love-hate relationship with one another. And just last week, Carlson said that he would return to Twitter after Musk’s acquisition.
Both social media giants have been embroiled in an ongoing culture war over the right to free expression. Twitter, for example, has come under fire for enabling accounts that spread false information to be promoted. Numerous people assume that Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” will allow accounts that have been banned for breaking the platform’s hate speech or disinformation policy to be restored. On more than one occasion, Facebook has been accused of facilitating the spread of far-right propaganda.
