“Just clarifying that his account is being suspended for incitement to violence, not an unflattering pic of me,” Musk said in response to West’s tweet.

West had also shared a picture of a shirtless Musk getting sprayed with water, captioned: “Let’s always remember this as my final tweet.”

Musk, who previously called himself a “free-speech absolutist”, has repeatedly said he believes all content permitted by law should be allowed on Twitter, and sought to remake the social media organisation after he took control in October.

Since taking over the platform, Musk has cut around half of Twitter’s workforce, including many employees tasked with fighting disinformation, while an unknown number of others have voluntarily quit.

The company has also begun reinstating roughly 62,000 accounts in what is being referred to internally as “the Big Bang”, according to the Platformer news blog.

West, who has hinted he is running for United States president in 2024, has made a series of anti-Semitic comments recently, and the one-time titan of fashion and music appears to have entered a disturbing spiral.

Yesterday, he appeared on Infowars, the show fronted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to rant about sin, pornography and the devil.

“I like Hitler,” West said several times.

Not long after, social media platform Parler – a favourite of conservatives for its hands-off approach to moderation – said a deal for West to buy the outfit was off.

During the interview, West hid his face completely under a mask that had neither eye nor mouth slits. However, Jones addressed him as West as they spoke; Infowars billed the interview as being with West; and at one point Jones took West’s mobile phone and posted a tweet on his account that appeared in real time.

‘I love Nazis’

On Infowars, West drew shocked laughter and even disagreement from far-right host Jones.

“I see good things about Hitler also,” he told Jones. “This guy… invented highways, invented the very microphone that I used as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I’m done with that.”

Hitler did not invent either of those things.

“I’m done with the classification, every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. I like Hitler.”

Jones, a serial provocateur who was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for claiming one of America’s deadliest school shootings was a “hoax”, interjected that “the Nazis were thugs and did really bad things”.

West did not back down.

“But they did good things, too. We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time… I love Nazis,” he said.

West appeared on Infowars alongside Nick Fuentes, the same white supremacist with whom West had dinner last week at former president Donald Trump’s Florida estate, in a meeting that provoked outrage.

Yesterday’s livestream sparked immediate condemnation from the Republican Jewish Coalition, which dubbed the three men “a disgusting triumvirate of conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, and anti-Semites”.

“Given his praise of Hitler, it can’t be overstated that Kanye West is a vile, repellent bigot who has targeted the Jewish community with threats and Nazi-style defamation,” a statement from the group said.

“Conservatives who have mistakenly indulged Kanye West must make it clear that he is a pariah. Enough is enough.”