For some months Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Jewish people. The posts deemed anti-Semitic have cost Musk a lot: in particular after a latest scandal, in November, many companies withdrew their advertising from California Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Monday he instead visited the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, where 1.1 million people were killed during the Second World War.
On this occasion, Musk reiterated that he had no prejudice against Jews, indeed he said he felt like an “aspiring Jew”.
Musk has been at the center of controversy and has been accused of anti-Semitism for some time, but the most serious case occurred on November 15, 2023, when he commented a post that accused the Jews who were victims of anti-Semitic attacks following the war in the Gaza Strip of using «the exact same dialectic based on hatred towards whites that they ask not to be used against them», also accusing them of encouraging the migration of “hordes of minorities”. Musk responded to the post by saying: “You told it like it is.”
Following the publication of Musk’s comment, some companies announced the suspension of their advertising campaigns on Musk had also been criticized by some Jewish civil rights organizations. On Monday he called that comment “the stupidest he has ever made” at the end of a visit to the former concentration camp, which also included his three-year-old son. Musk was accompanied by Rabbi Menachem Margolin, founder of the Association of European Jews, Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev and Ben Shapiro, a well-known far-right activist and journalist.
Elon Musk durante la conferenza a Cracovia (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
With Shapiro he then attended a conference on anti-Semitism in Krakow, where he admitted that he had been “a little naive” and that he had underestimated the impact of anti-Semitism because “in the circles I frequent, I don’t see anti-Semitism”. Musk added: “Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish, and so I’m Jewish too, by proximity. I am an aspiring Jew.”
Musk then called the comment on the anti-Semitic post a mistake. In response to those who accuse him of having allowed racist and anti-Semitic content to increase on X, he instead reiterated his position in favor of total freedom of expression. After acquiring the social network in 2022, Musk implemented some changes to the content moderation systems (effectively weakening it greatly), claiming that he wanted to protect the freedom of expression of every member of the service. Since then, according to numerous analyses, the amount of hateful, violent and fake news content has increased significantly: a 2023 British study showed a 105 percent growth in anti-Semitic content in the months following his arrival at the helm of Twitter.
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