Elon Musk, whose 2022 acquisition of X (then known as Twitter) included major cuts to content moderation around hate speech, drew a fresh wave of backlash this week by endorsing an antisemitic social media post that he described as “the actual truth.”
On Wednesday, an X user shared footage of a PSA created by the Foundation To Combat Antisemitism, which shows a father confronting his teenage son for posting a neo-Nazi message online.
“To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right’: You got something you want to say? Why dont you say it to our faces,” wrote the user, whose profile indicates that he identifies as Jewish.
In response, a second X user then accused Jewish communities of “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
“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,” the second user wrote. “You want truth said to your face, there it is.”
Shortly after, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.”
As a number of media outlets have noted, the tweet that Musk endorsed echoes a conspiracy theory linking Jewish people to both anti-white sentiment and nonwhite immigration. The theory was embraced by the gunman in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, which left 11 people dead in Pittsburgh.
“The billionaire affirmed the deadliest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in recent American history,” The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg wrote. Bloomberg journalist Matthew Yglesias agreed, saying, “America’s richest man chimes in to say that Jews are getting what we deserve for being liberals.”
Elsewhere in Wednesday’s X thread, Musk took aim at the Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy group that works to combat hate against Jewish people.
“The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel,” Musk wrote. “This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
He continued: “And, at the risk of being repetitive, I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind. I’m sick of it. Stop now.”
Musk and the Anti-Defamation League have publicly sparred in the past.
In September, the tech billionaire threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against the group amid an ongoing slump in X’s advertising revenue. In response, a spokesperson for the ADL had no comment on Musk’s threat, but compared it to others’ attempts to target the civil rights watchdog.
“This type of thing is nothing new,” the spokesperson said at the time.