CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan: ‘I Poked The Billionaire’

CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan flatly denied doing anything to violate Twitter’s rules, saying he was suspended from Elon Musk’s social media site for just one reason: “I poked the billionaire.”

O’Sullivan is one of a group of journalists whose Twitter accounts were permanently suspended Thursday night, a move O’Sullivan said came without warning. “Last night, around 8 p.m., colleague Oliver Darcy texted me to say, ‘you’ve been suspended from Twitter.’”

Musk, appearing briefly in a live Twitter Spaces conversation Thursday night, was asked about the suspensions and said the journalists had “doxxed” him by revealing the location of Musk and his family—a charge O’Sullivan said was “entirely false,” and that none of the suspended journalists had posted Musk’s “precise, live location.”

“This all goes back to a few days ago when there’s this account that tracks the location—using publicly available information—of (Elon Musk’s) plane,” O’Sullivan said. “And he kicked that off Twitter. He changed the rules to make it against Twitter’s rules. And we were reporting on that. We were reporting on the shutdown yesterday and late last night.”

O’Sullivan conceded that Twitter under Musk is a private company and can do whatever it pleases. “But coming from the guy who’s the free speech absolutist, who says he wants this to be a beacon of free expression, it is quite something to see him banning journalists who just happen to cover him critically, but I would also say fairly.”