Elon Musk responds to rumor he wants to buy OANN

Who wants to OANN it?

Billionaire inventor and businessman Elon Musk — who is trying to buy Twitter — is no stranger to challenges. But after OANN CEO Robert Herring appeared to tweet that his fledgling cable outlet may have found its white knight, Musk indicated it wasn’t him.

“We just received a call from somebody very close to Elon Musk telling us that he would like to talk to us about purchasing OANN,” reads a tweet from an unverified account seeming to belong to Herring.

With a worth of over $218 billion, Musk is the world’s richest person. That apparently doesn’t mean he’s in the market for a cable station that’s a haven for all things Donald Trump and the right wing.

“Only Twitter,” Musk responded.

It was reported in April that Musk was in the process of purchasing the social media network he often uses as a source of expression for nearly $44 billion. That deal has hit a couple of snags, including Musk’s concerns that a larger than expected number of what the platform counts as users may be bots.

OANN, which stands for One America News Network, was dealt a serious blow at the start of April when it was dropped by its largest distributor, DirecTV. The conservative outlet filed suit against that digital satellite provider’s parent company, AT&T, after being dumped.

John Oliver takes ‘joy’ in OAN’s decline, mocks the embattled network one more time

OANN itself is the target of lawsuits filed by two voting technologies companies asking over a billion dollars each for damages they claim the cable channel inflicted through its reporting on alleged voting irregularities in the 2020 election. The station unabashedly cheer-led for Trump when he was in office and continued referring to him as “President Trump” long after he left office.

OANN has a steady history of employing dubious conspiracy theorists. It’s not clear who told Herring Musk is interested in buying his company. OANN has not immediately responded to a request for comment.

Musk said last month that he has historically favored the Democratic party, but will now be voting Republican.