“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 really do is the opposite is very dishonest. I’m not a fan of Musk. And I would love for him to be the first man on Mars,” he said.
When the interviewer asked, “So that he stays there…”, the writer said that he wants him to leave. Rushdie further recalled his meeting with Musk a decade ago in Los Angeles. “Yes, let him go. If he likes it so much, then let him go. 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,” he added.The novelist also talked about the significant anti-immigration narrative gaining traction in the West. The interviewer asked the author, who is of Indian origin but immigrated to the UK and later the United States, “Why do you think cultural values like tolerance or empathy have lost so much support?”
Rushdie said that those values were weaker now than ever in his lifetime “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 added.
He highlighted that except for the Native Americans, everyone is a migrant in the US. “The great American myth is now said to be bad, evil. Even Elon Musk is from South Africa,” Rushdie said.
Rushdie suffered a stabbing attack that nearly killed him on August 12, 2022. The 77-year-old author was left seriously wounded and blind in one eye.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
