You can see the moment Elon Musk decided to cancel Don Lemon’s talk show. It comes about half an hour into the X interview Lemon released Monday, during a line of questioning about the racist conspiracy theory the temperamental billionaire has embraced of late. After some strained efforts by Musk to defend his various ramblings about undocumented immigrants and the antisemitic tweet he had to apologize for in November, Lemon asks him, “Do you think if you moderated yourself more, or if there was better content moderation on the platform, that you wouldn’t have to answer these questions from reporters about the Great Replacement Theory?”

“I don’t have to answer these questions,” a frustrated Musk interjects. “I don’t have to answer questions from reporters. Don, the only reason I’m doing this interview is because you’re on X platform and you asked for it. Otherwise, I would not do this interview.”

Musk had appeared increasingly combative in the lead-up to the exchange, as Lemon asked him about the rightward shift of his politics and especially about whether he was sober during his late-night shitposting sessions. (Though Tesla and SpaceX officials have reportedly expressed concerns about his alleged drug usage, Musk suggested to Lemon that he only uses prescription ketamine.) But this was the moment he lost whatever was left of his patience—when Lemon directly probed the intersection of Musk’s erratic, conspiratorial personal behavior and the way he runs his business. “I could care less” about public criticism, he told Lemon. “I don’t think people should care what the media thinks about them.”

Like much of what Musk says, the remarks were meant to sound defiant, smart, and iconoclastic, but instead came off as childish and small—especially after he abruptly fired Lemon over the interview, which he complained was like “CNN, but on social media.” Far from revealing Lemon to be a “stupid asshole,” as Musk described him afterward, the sit-down was just another maddening peek into the increasingly extremist and internet-rotted mind of one of the world’s richest and most powerful people. “He has devolved into [a] very ill informed thinker on a number of complex topics,” the tech journalist Kara Swisher wrote Monday.

That’s putting it mildly.

Over the course of an hour with Lemon, Musk railed against diversity programs, the “woke mind virus,” and various other fixations of the online right. He doubled down on his xenophobic theory that Democrats, as he posted earlier this month, are “importing voters.” (Joe Biden’s immigration policy, he suggested in that post, is “treasonous.”) He insisted that content moderation was tantamount to “censorship.” He brushed off racism in the United States, telling Lemon that “we are all descended from slaves.” And he managed to make his social media antics seem even more embarrassing, comparing them to a “hardcore” player-versus-player video game. (Musk is 52 years old.) These rantings aren’t new to anyone familiar with his online presence, of course. But his right-wing meme politics sound particularly obtuse spoken aloud, removed from the context of the feverish conservative internet bubbles that produced them.

While Musk now sounds nearly indistinguishable from any other hyper-online, right-wing radical, he has far more influence than the average crank, what with deep pockets, a devoted following, and untold control over Twitter's algorithm. Needless to say, all of this could have big implications on 2024: Musk told Lemon he did not “want to put a thumb on the scale” this November “monetarily,” downplayed his meeting this month with Donald Trump, and said the cash-strapped former president did not ask him for a loan. Still, the CEO acknowledged that he “may, in the final stretch, endorse a candidate.” Was he leaning toward one or the other? Lemon asked him. “I’m leaning away from Biden,” Musk replied.

That is, slouching toward Trumpism. As Axios noted Tuesday, Musk has been framing the prospect of Biden’s reelection in increasingly apocalyptic terms: “It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11,” he wrote in one recent post. “America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state,” he said in another. It remains to be seen if he’ll ultimately throw his support behind the former president. But Musk certainly seems to share Trump’s delusions of grandeur—and thin-skin when those delusions are met with even slight scrutiny.

“We only have a couple minutes left,” Musk told Lemon, after an extended exchange about hate speech on his platform. “One or two questions we can do, and then we’ll have to call it.”

“I don’t mean to upset you,” Lemon said.

“I have a whole room of people waiting to meet with me,” Musk said. “So we’re just going overtime.”