Tech billionaire Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would allow former President Donald Trump back on Twitter after Musk completes his plan to buy the social media service.
Musk said at an event sponsored by the Financial Times that it was “foolish in the extreme” for Twitter to permanently suspend Trump in January 2021 after Trump’s supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, according to a video of the event posted online.
“I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” Musk, the CEO of Tesla, told the newspaper’s Future of the Car event via remote video.
“I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice,” he said, citing Trump’s newly launched tech platform, Truth Social.
“I would reverse the permanent ban,” Musk said.
Twitter’s CEO at the time, Jack Dorsey, defended the Trump ban as protecting against offline harm “based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter.”
Trump said last month that he would not return to Twitter even if allowed to do so, telling Fox News that he was committed to Truth Social. It’s not clear if Trump would change his mind.
Musk said he feared that political discussions would become too fractured if conservatives weren’t welcome on Twitter.
“I think this could end up being frankly worse than having a single forum where everyone could debate,” he said.
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This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com.