OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla boss Elon Musk exchanged loads of barbs over the previous yr regarding artificial intelligence. However on Friday, Musk expressed settlement with Altman’s evaluation of one thing fairly completely different: antisemitism.
This week, Harvard president Claudine Homosexual and different college leaders were grilled on Capitol Hill on how their establishments had responded to antisemitism, in opposition to the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas struggle. They confronted backlash from lawmakers and the White Home over their rigorously worded responses, and later adopted up with stronger condemnation of hate speech in opposition to Jewish college students.
“For a long time I said that antisemitism, particularly on the American left, was not as bad as people claimed,” Altman, who’s of Jewish descent, posted to X on Thursday night. “I’d like to just state that I was totally wrong. I still don’t understand it, really. Or know what to do about it. But it is so f**ked.”
Musk responded with a easy “yes” on Friday.
Whereas such a reply may usually appear unremarkable, it dropped as Musk has been responding to intense backlash—together with from the White House and Tesla investors—over endorsing an antisemitic put up by one other person on X final month.
The post read, “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” It echoed an antisemitic conspiracy concept typically espoused by hate teams that accuses Jews of eager to flood Western nations with nonwhite immigrants.
Musk replied with, “You have said the actual truth.”
He adopted up with a reference to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy group he threatened to sue in September, saying it was “trying to kill this platform” by falsely accusing it and him of being antisemitic.
“The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel,” he wrote. “This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist,” owns X, which he purchased for $44 billion final yr when it was nonetheless referred to as Twitter.
A day after Musk’s feedback, Media Issues, a liberal watchdog group, stated it discovered adverts on X for main corporations—together with Bravo, Oracle, and IBM—subsequent to posts celebrating Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Get together.
IBM then stated it had pulled its promoting from the platform, citing “zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination.” Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount Global additionally stated they had been suspending or pausing promoting.
Musk vowed a “thermonuclear” lawsuit in opposition to Media Issues and others “who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company,” with X submitting the lawsuit on Nov. 20.
Musk additionally went on the offensive in opposition to the mainstream media and Disney CEO Bob Iger.
“This past week, there were hundreds of bogus media stories claiming that I am antisemitic,” he posted. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
He wrote on Thursday that Iger “should be fired immediately,” and that “Walt Disney is turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company.”
Musk additionally suggested Iger ought to pull adverts from Meta’s platforms. He pointed to an article about New Mexico state submitting a lawsuit in opposition to Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging they allowed Facebook and Instagram to change into “a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey.”
That adopted Musk responding with a vulgarity on the New York Instances Dealbook Summit to Iger’s earlier feedback on the occasion on why Disney stopped promoting on X. “We just felt that the association with… Elon Musk and X was not necessarily a positive one for us,” Iger said.
Musk responded later whereas on stage, “If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f— yourself…Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience, that’s how I feel: don’t advertise.”
Musk additionally visited Israel after the controversy, although he said on the Dealbook Summit that it wasn’t an “apology tour” for the put up on X.
Some distinguished figures have come to Musk’s protection, among them billionaire investor Invoice Ackman, who has been a robust critic of Harvard College’s response to claims of antisemitism on its campus. The founding father of Pershing Sq. Capital Administration wrote on X, “Elon Musk is not an antisemite,” including, “It is remarkable how quickly the world stands ready to attack Musk for his shoot-from-the-hip commentary.”
On the Dealbook summit, Musk admitted that on reflection, he would “not have replied to that particular post,” including, “I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me, and arguably to those who are antisemitic, and for that I am quite sorry.”
