Elon Musk has finally said he’s sorry for posting conspiracy theories about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband when she was House Speaker. His apology came after the release of bodycam footage of the assault.
He previously tweeted a link allegedly claiming that Paul Pelosi was drunk and had an altercation with a picked-up guy at the time of the attack. However, his post was deleted shortly after he made it, but the tweet had already received more than 24,000 retweets and 86,000 likes. People were worried that, because of his controversial post, hate speech and harassment would become more common on Twitter if he was in charge. Though he made announcements that there would be new content moderation policies to decrease harmful posts on the said platform.
In the video, Pelosi is assaulted with a hammer in his San Francisco home in October 2022. The attacker was identified as David DePape and was charged with attempted murder. Fortunately, the police came when Pelosi and DePape were struggling over the hammer. Also, the 82-year-old man wore only his pajamas when the invader came. Then the police saw DePape grab the hammer and hit Pelosi on the head. Pelosi was taken to the hospital and underwent head surgery because of a skull fracture. He also had injuries on his arm that needed to be treated. DePape is now in prison and waiting for his trial on the charges of the attack he committed, such as attempted murder and elder abuse. According to the investigators, the suspect was targeting the former House Speaker because he was looking for her.
Even though Musk apologized in the post, he did not rule out the possibility that the assault was related to Pelosi’s altercation with a male escort at a gay bar in San Francisco. He still believed that it could be true. Many known personalities asked Musk to apologize, including former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who asked Musk on Twitter about his reaction to the recently released video. MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle also tweeted about Musk’s apology. He responded that he did apologize, but there was no information on whether he personally apologized to the family or whether the apology was accepted. Musk is not the only public figure who has expressed conspiracy theories about the attack.