For years, some people with the unlucky habit of paying too much attention to Elon Musk have complained the man is a racist. He’s posted countless dog whistles, liked disturbing tweets, and used his platform to boost white nationalists, but he’s always managed to walk right up to the line of plausible deniability. But the body of evidence grows, and this week, for just a moment, the gloves came off.
On Wednesday, Musk endorsed a tweet that said Jewish communities have been pushing “hatred against whites.” Musk responded, “You have said the actual truth.”
The billionaire was weighing in on a conversation about antisemitism on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. @CWBOCA, a popular user and self-described “Jewish conservative from Florida,” posted a video denouncing the widespread use of the phrase “Hitler was right” on X.
This, for some reason, was upsetting to a lot of people. “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” a user named @breakingbaht responded. “I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”
Musk’s endorsement of the tweet—again, “You have said the actual truth”—has been viewed 4.9 million times at the time of writing. He went on to rail against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a non-profit and sometimes controversial civil rights group that advocates against antisemitism.
“The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel,” Musk said. “This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
The comments section quickly flooded with gleeful racism, with responses including “Hail Elon Hail our people,” “Thank you Elon! Jews flood our nations with foreigners and teach them to hate us,” and “Judaism is extremely anti European.”
Recently, Musk has picked a public fight with the ADL. The organization is one of many that have criticized the well-documented and rampant antisemitism that skyrocketed on X since the Tesla CEO took over. Musk argues that the ADL’s advocacy is, in effect, just another Jewish conspiracy meant to destroy his website. He threatened to sue the ADL in September, claiming it scared away advertisers and cost X $22 billion. In reality, the exodus of advertisers started well before the ADL got involved, and companies that have spoken on the record typically blame Musk for their departure. His lawsuit against the non-profit never materialized.
Musk’s comments on the “actual truth” about Jews came the same day the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), another civil rights organization, released new research which found that 98% of racist and antisemitic tweets examined by the group were still up on the platform a week after being reported for violating hate speech rules. Musk is currently suing the CCDH for defaming X, accusing the organization of spreading false information about hate speech and misinformation on Musk’s website in a conspiracy to scare advertisers.
X did not respond to a request for comment. X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s timeline has been notably quiet since her boss decided to weigh in on the Jewish people.
Musk’s battle with the ADL may have started long before he had any reason to pick a fight with the group. An investigation by NBC noted that an unnamed person texted Musk an article on the day he bought Twitter, laying out a game plan for how the purchase could be a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The term “Globalist” is often used as an antisemitic slur. Musk’s actions over the last year and a half closely mirror the strategy laid out in that article — including the suggestion that Musk should attack the ADL.
This isn’t the first episode in Musk’s years-long flirtation with what many view as antisemitism, which includes tweeting a now-deleted photo of a Nazi soldier and numerous friendly interactions with self-described White Supremacists. In May, Musk tweeted that billionaire philanthropist George Soros “reminds me of Magneto,” the Marvel Comics supervillain who “fights to help mutants replace humans as the world’s dominant species.” Like Soros, the fictional Magneto is a Jewish holocaust survivor. Soros is a favorite boogeyman of the right who is often the subject of virulent antisemitic conspiracy theories. Must be a coincidence.
Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity,” Musk tweeted.
Elon Musk wants you to know about all the supposed evils of the Jewish community, but he also wants you to know he’s not an antisemite. “Obviously I’m against antisemitism. I’m against anti-anything that promotes hate and conflict,” he said in a recent conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. You have to wonder what Musk thinks antisemitism is.
Update 4:07 PM: X CEO Linda Yaccarino has broken her silence and assured the world that X is not antisemitic. She did not say whether or not Musk himself is antisemitic. Her tweet reads in full: “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on. When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”