A timeline of Elon Musk’s beef with Kanye West

What happens when you put two of the most divisive figures on the planet together?

A relentless social media saga is the short answer.

Elon Musk and Kanye West have been busy firing off messages to and about each other ever since the Tesla boss took over Twitter with the declared aim of championing free speech.

And on Friday, the platform suspended the disgraced rapper’s account for posting an antisemitic image.

Since then, Ye has questioned Musk’s ethnicity and Musk has revealed that he wanted to “punch” West over the tweet that became the final nail in his Twitter coffin.

For anyone who’s struggling to keep up with the twists and turns, here’s a look at the pair’s back-and-forth over the past few days.

Thursday

Ye dumped a series of tweets, one of which featured a picture of a Star of David with a swastika in the middle.

“YE24. LOVE EVERYONE #LOVESPEECH,” he wrote alongside the image, referring to his plans to run in the next US presidential election.

The deeply disturbing post was swiftly removed from the platform and replaced with a message stating that it had “violated” Twitter's rules.

It came just hours after the fallen hip-hop star praised Adolf Hitler in an Infowars interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

He then shared a photo of Musk being hosed down on a yacht, writing: “Let’s always remember this as my final tweet #ye24.”

Musk then replied: “That is fine,” before pointing to Ye’s deleted swastika message and stressing: “This is not.”

Ye then turned to Truth Social to share screenshots of personal text message exchanges between the SpaceX billionaire and him.

“Sorry, but you have gone too far. This is not love,” Musk apparently wrote to him, alongside a link to the tweet.

West then replied: “Who made you the judge.”

Musk responded to the Sunday Service founder with the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, As it is in heaven.”

The platform’s CEO then confirmed that the rapper’s account was being suspended indefinitely for violating its policy against inciting violence.

Friday

Musk replied to a Twitter user who had pleaded: “Elon Fix Kanye Please".

"I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended,” he confirmed.

The self-styled free speech “absolutist”, had welcomed the return of the rapper to the platform two weeks earlier after he was banned at the start of October over a stream of antisemitic vitriol, but even he couldn’t let that Nazi symbol slide.

Saturday

The world’s richest man was asked about his decision to suspend Ye during a Twitter Spaces Q&A.

He replied: “I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that was definitely inciting me to violence,” he said.

Musk insisted that he’d tried to persuade West not to post antisemitic content, but was ultimately forced to remove him because “at some point you have to say what is incitement to violence because it is against the law in the US”.

“Posting swastikas in what obviously is not a good way is an incitement to violence,” he added.

We’d say there’s no “good way” to post swastikas, full-stop.

Sunday

Ye decided to take his ranting from Truth Social to Instagram, this time commenting on Musk's appearance and suggesting he could be "half-Chinese genetic hybrid".

Here's what the whole, bizarre all-caps message said:

Monday

Musk replied that he took the description as a "compliment":

And Ye then replied, again on Instagram, that he meant it as such:

So the latest is that the pair are "friends" again?

We really can't keep up...

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