Kanye West Thanks Elon Musk for 'Allowing Me to Vent' Before Shutting Down X Account Following Tweets Praising Hitler

Rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, bid his social media platform of choice, X, adieu on Sunday night, thanking the platform's owner, billionaire Elon Musk, for allowing him to use the platform to vent before shutting down his account.

"I'm logging out of Twitter. I appreciate Elon for allowing me to vent," West wrote. "It has been very cathartic to use the world as a sounding board. It was like an Ayahuasca trip. Love all of you who gave me the energy and attention. To [sic] we connect again. Good afternoon and goodnight."

West spent the weekend posting intense vitriol to his X profile, much of which was incredibly anti-semitic. Some of his posts included statements such as "I'm a Nazi" and "I love Hitler."

"We can't stop a deranged bigot from spewing hate-filled, ignorant bile... but we CAN stop giving him a megaphone, Mr. Musk," said Friends star David Schwimmer on Instagram, in a direct appeal to Musk. "Kanye West has 32.7 million followers on your platform, X. That's twice as many people than the number of Jews in existence."

"His sick hate speech results in REAL LIFE violence against Jews," Schwimmer continued.

In October of 2022, West was banned from the platform for similar anti-semitic rhetoric, with his account being reinstated that November, only to be banned again quickly.

Eight months later, his account was once again reinstated.

West's posts also included deeply misogynistic comments, including one in which he promoted violence against women while admitting that he "has hit women before".

Since Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022 the platform's content has become increasingly right-wing despite Musk's insistence that he would only promote First Amendment-related values on the app.

"For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally," Musk posted on the app shortly before buying it.

However, many have pointed out that Musk's platform policies have given rise to accounts aiming to promote right-wing and hateful rhetoric.

"We do have a lot of evidence to suspect that X is turning more and more far-right by the day," Giulio Corsi, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who studied X's recommendation algorithm, told NBC News.

In December of last year, Musk reinstated the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after he was banned for promoting conspiracy theories around the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, alleging that the tragedy was a "hoax."

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in an April 2022 post.