Elon Musk Claims Social Media Could Have Mitigated Holocaust

Months after losing a slew of advertisers after he publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory, X owner Elon Musk continued his “I am not an antisemite” tour on Monday with a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp memorial. 

During his private tour of the memorial, Musk laid a wreath and participated in a remembrance ceremony. “It hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person … it will take a few days to sink in, frankly,” Musk told right-wing Jewish podcaster Ben Shapiro during an interview following the visit, both of which were hosted by the European Jewish Association (EJA). 

Throughout the discussion, Shapiro lobbed softball after softball at Musk, avoiding directly questioning him on statements he’s made attacking prominent Jewish groups and promoting an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory. No mention was made of the fact that in August, the Auschwitz Memorial Museum directly criticized Musk for failing to proactively remove antisemitic content from X, formerly Twitter, or the slew of reports that have found a marked spike in antisemitic content since his takeover of the platform. Instead, Shapiro allowed Musk to wax at length about his many Jewish friends and frame criticism of him as attempts by the legacy media to “cancel” him and his social media company. 

The conversation opened with a video produced by the EJA imagining what the response to the Holocaust, in which the Nazi regime killed over six million Jews throughout Europe, would have been like if social media — and X — had existed at the time. 

“If we had had X in 1939, how many lives could have been saved?” the video asked. 

Musk responded that “had there been social media [the Holocaust] would have been impossible to hide, if there had been freedom of speech as well.” He went on to reference Adolf Hitler and the Nazi efforts to censor coverage of their atrocities in the press, with no mention of his own efforts to curtail pro-Palestinian content on X.

Musk’s comments that social media could have prevented, or at least mitigated, genocide ring hollow without the necessary acknowledgment of the ongoing humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. The pair did not seriously discuss allegations that Israel’s response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack has amounted to a genocidal campaign of annihilation against Palestinians. Musk instead simply brushed off the more than 25,000 Palestinian deaths since the start of the war as an inevitable reality that “some innocent people will die, there’s no way around it.” 

Musk and Shaprio reframed support for Palestinians’ human and political rights as being inherently pro-terrorist, with Musk expressing his shock at what he called “pro-Hamas” rallies in major cities in “the West” and on college campuses. At one point, Musk said that while things like “diversity, equity, inclusion” that are promoted by liberal universities and institutions sound nice, they are really “discrimination on the bases of race, sex, and sexual orientation … and thus I fundamentally think it’s antisemitic.” 

In November, major advertisers fled X after a report by progressive watchdog Media Matters found evidence that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content. Musk gave advertisers even more reason to leave the same week when he responded “You have said the actual truth,” to a post claiming that Jews promote “dialectical hatred against whites.” Earlier in 2023, Musk directly engaged with efforts by white nationalist and neo-Nazis — many of whom Musk reinstated to X following his purchase of the platform — to have the Anti-Defamation League banned from the website. 

“ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter,” Musk wrote in response to a tweet from Keith Woods, a self-described ethnonationalist and antisemite. 

Following the advertiser exodus, Musk embarked on the public relations tour that brought him to Auschwitz on Monday. In late November, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and toured a kibbutz devastated in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. The heavily publicized visit caused outrage even among the Israeli press. “Blatant antisemite [and] publisher of antisemitism Elon Musk should be persona non grata in Israel,” Esther Solomon, the editor-in-chief at Haaretz, wrote on X. “Instead, Netanyahu – plumbing new depths of amoral sycophancy – gifts him a PR visit to the kibbutzim devastated by Hamas. Profane, venal, bilious, both of them.” 

Amy Spiro, a writer at The Jerusalem Post, added in her own post that it was “Hard to stomach welcoming someone who just days ago endorsed a virulently antisemitic trope, has dabbled for years in antisemitism and has turned this platform into a cesspool of hate. It’s quite frankly gross.”   

Musk closed the interview at the Holocaust memorial on Monday by saying that he “certainly” hoped there would never be another genocide like the Holocaust, calling it an “extremely unlikely” event for the West. Despite Musk being seated in front of a screen reading “Never Again,” it didn’t seem that the ongoing slaughter in Palestine was a concern to anyone in the room. 

Months after losing a slew of advertisers after he publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory, X owner Elon Musk continued his “I am not an antisemite” tour on Monday with a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp memorial. 

During his private tour of the memorial, Musk laid a wreath and participated in a remembrance ceremony. “It hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person … it will take a few days to sink in, frankly,” Musk told right-wing Jewish podcaster Ben Shapiro during an interview following the visit, both of which were hosted by the European Jewish Association (EJA). 

Throughout the discussion, Shapiro lobbed softball after softball at Musk, avoiding directly questioning him on statements he’s made attacking prominent Jewish groups and promoting an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory. No mention was made of the fact that in August, the Auschwitz Memorial Museum directly criticized Musk for failing to proactively remove antisemitic content from X, formerly Twitter, or the slew of reports that have found a marked spike in antisemitic content since his takeover of the platform. Instead, Shapiro allowed Musk to wax at length about his many Jewish friends and frame criticism of him as attempts by the legacy media to “cancel” him and his social media company. 

The conversation opened with a video produced by the EJA imagining what the response to the Holocaust, in which the Nazi regime killed over six million Jews throughout Europe, would have been like if social media — and X — had existed at the time. 

“If we had had X in 1939, how many lives could have been saved?” the video asked. 

Musk responded that “had there been social media [the Holocaust] would have been impossible to hide, if there had been freedom of speech as well.” He went on to reference Adolf Hitler and the Nazi efforts to censor coverage of their atrocities in the press, with no mention of his own efforts to curtail pro-Palestinian content on X.

Musk’s comments that social media could have prevented, or at least mitigated, genocide ring hollow without the necessary acknowledgment of the ongoing humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. The pair did not seriously discuss allegations that Israel’s response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack has amounted to a genocidal campaign of annihilation against Palestinians. Musk instead simply brushed off the more than 25,000 Palestinian deaths since the start of the war as an inevitable reality that “some innocent people will die, there’s no way around it.” 

Musk and Shaprio reframed support for Palestinians’ human and political rights as being inherently pro-terrorist, with Musk expressing his shock at what he called “pro-Hamas” rallies in major cities in “the West” and on college campuses. At one point, Musk said that while things like “diversity, equity, inclusion” that are promoted by liberal universities and institutions sound nice, they are really “discrimination on the bases of race, sex, and sexual orientation … and thus I fundamentally think it’s antisemitic.” 

In November, major advertisers fled X after a report by progressive watchdog Media Matters found evidence that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content. Musk gave advertisers even more reason to leave the same week when he responded “You have said the actual truth,” to a post claiming that Jews promote “dialectical hatred against whites.” Earlier in 2023, Musk directly engaged with efforts by white nationalist and neo-Nazis — many of whom Musk reinstated to X following his purchase of the platform — to have the Anti-Defamation League banned from the website. 

“ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter,” Musk wrote in response to a tweet from Keith Woods, a self-described ethnonationalist and antisemite. 

Following the advertiser exodus, Musk embarked on the public relations tour that brought him to Auschwitz on Monday. In late November, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and toured a kibbutz devastated in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. The heavily publicized visit caused outrage even among the Israeli press. “Blatant antisemite [and] publisher of antisemitism Elon Musk should be persona non grata in Israel,” Esther Solomon, the editor-in-chief at Haaretz, wrote on X. “Instead, Netanyahu – plumbing new depths of amoral sycophancy – gifts him a PR visit to the kibbutzim devastated by Hamas. Profane, venal, bilious, both of them.” 

Amy Spiro, a writer at The Jerusalem Post, added in her own post that it was “Hard to stomach welcoming someone who just days ago endorsed a virulently antisemitic trope, has dabbled for years in antisemitism and has turned this platform into a cesspool of hate. It’s quite frankly gross.”   

Musk closed the interview at the Holocaust memorial on Monday by saying that he “certainly” hoped there would never be another genocide like the Holocaust, calling it an “extremely unlikely” event for the West. Despite Musk being seated in front of a screen reading “Never Again,” it didn’t seem that the ongoing slaughter in Palestine was a concern to anyone in the room.