Ex-Parler CEO John Matze says he didn’t want to do business with Donald Trump because he worried the former president might bend the social network to his will.
Parler — a right-wing rival to Twitter that was forced offline a month ago — offered Trump’s real estate company a 40 percent stake in the business if he made the platform his primary social media home, BuzzFeed News reported Friday.
“I didn’t like the idea of working with Trump, because he might have bullied people inside the company to do what he wanted,” Matze, who was recently fired as Parler’s chief executive, told the outlet. “But I was worried that if we didn’t sign the deal, he might have been vengeful and told his followers to leave Parler.”
Matze — who has claimed in court papers that Trump wanted to join Parler under the pseudonym “Person X” — said he did not know why the former president never set up an account.
“If I were him, I would’ve joined,” Matze told Axios. “I think it was clear that he was going to get banned off of Twitter and everywhere else, and I think we made it pretty clear that we weren’t going to ban him unless he broke our rules and that we wouldn’t ban him because other people did.”