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The Biden White House is strongly condemning the promotion by one of the nation’s top Defense Dept. contractors, billionaire Elon Musk, of an antisemitic post. Critics say the world’s richest person has turned his $44 billion purchase of the social media site Twitter, now X, into a haven for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
“We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said, according to The Guardian. “It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk had said on X on Wednesday, in response to a user who accused “Jewish communties” [sic] of “pushing … hatred against whites.” Separately, Musk also attacked (again) the Anti-Defamation League, by writing, “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.”
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The Guardian noted, “Musk has feuded with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) before, threatening to sue over its accounting of hate speech on his social media network.”
On Thursday, Musk wrote on X, “Media Matters is an evil organization,” after the left-leaning media watchdog published numerous articles this week focused on Musk and X.
Among them: “X is placing ads for Amazon, NBA Mexico, NBCUniversal, and others next to content with white nationalist hashtags,” and, “It’s the antisemitism, stupid,” which alleges, “No advertiser is safe while Elon Musk controls X.”
Another piece, “Elon Musk lights his tiki torch,” claims: “The X owner has opened the floodgates to bigots because he agrees with them.”
In that last piece, Media Matters writes: “The conspiracy theory, that Jewish populations are pushing ‘hatred against whites’ and supporting ‘hordes of minorities’ coming into the country, is the same one that motivated the 2018 Tree of Life shooter in Pittsburgh, as noted by The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg. Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and other figures linked to white nationalism are cheering on Musk.”
And while many people know Musk is the world’s richest man, at $242.3 billion, according to Forbes, and know him for the electric auto manufacturer Tesla (which he bought into and currently owns about 21% if its stock,) and of course the social media platform X, that was once Twitter, fewer know that he is a major U.S. government contractor.
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In 2002 Musk founded SpaceX which “is worth nearly $150 billion after a $750 million tender offer in June 2023; it nearly quintupled its value in four years,” Forbes notes.
In September, the Pentagon awarded SpaceX with a $70 million contract for its Starshield satellite network developing for military use.
“The Pentagon is already a high-value buyer of the company’s rocket launches and had shown increasing interest in its Starlink satellite internet,” CNBC reported. “SpaceX’s award for Starshield follows its June win of a Pentagon contract to buy an undefined number of Starlink ground terminals for use in Ukraine.”
Calling Musk’s influence “brazen and expansive,” The New Yorker‘s Ronan Farrow in August wrote: “How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.”
“There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space,” Farrow explained. “SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year.”
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Image: Elon Musk, photo by NASA/Aubrey Gemignani via Flickr
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