Elon Musk faces scrutiny after calling antisemitic X post the ‘absolute truth’

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is facing a wave of backlash after engaging with an antisemitic social media post Wednesday, calling it the “absolute truth.”

The antisemitic post Musk seemed to endorse came in response to a user on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, who expressed concern about rising antisemitism.

“To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right’: You got something you want to say?” the initial user, who identified themselves as a “Jewish Conservative” in their bio, wrote. “Why dont you say it to our faces.”

Another user responded, suggesting antisemitism was carried out by minorities and claimed the Jews were to blame.

“Okay. Jewish [communities] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” the post read.

“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 user continued, adding, “You want truth said to your face, there it is.”

Musk replied: “You have said the actual truth.”

The claim echoes false conspiracy theories that say Jews want to flood the country with minorities.

As The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg noted, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooter in 2018 — the man who carried out the country’s deadliest antisemitic attack — espoused this conspiracy theory in the last words he posted before entering the synagogue on the morning of the shooting.

The shooter wrote The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. … Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Musk’s apparent endorsement of this conspiracy theory faced immediate scrutiny online.

CNN’s Jake Tapper responded on X, describing the tech billionaire’s response as “pushing unvarnished anti semitism at a time of rising antisemitism and violence against Jews.”

Other journalists, including Matthew Yglesias, also responded to the post, characterizing it by saying: “America’s richest man chimes in to say that Jews are getting what we deserve for being liberals.”

In a follow-up post on X, Musk went after the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that advocates against antisemitic and hate speech, saying, “The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel.”

“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 added.

His post only continued a longtime feud between Musk and the ADL, which has been a target of the billionaire’s ire as he blamed the league’s criticism for falling ad revenue.

In February, after he bought Twitter, multiple reports began to surface showing how Musk’s posts on X, called Twitter at the time, were boosted by a factor of 1,000 — confirming what many users anecdotally felt to be true as Musk’s posts flooded their feeds.

Many experts have warned this gives Musk a far bigger platform than other users, making his voice all the more powerful.