President Herzog meets with Elon Musk – Photo by Haim Zach/GPO
Elon Musk, the controversial owner of Twitter and founder of electric car company Tesla, is headed to Auschwitz. The mercurial businessman is reportedly going to the concentration camp as part of his efforts to make up for what was perceived in the past as ant-Semitic comments on his part.
The visit to Auschwitz, the most notorious of the nazi death camps from the Holocaust, will come as part of a two day visit to Poland during which Elon Musk will take part in a panel to discuss online antisemitism at the European Jewish Association’s annual conference in Krakow.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Szejna said of Elon Musk’s visit, “Everyone acknowledges what a great threat nationalism, populism, racism, and all manifestations of xenophobia and hatred are to democracy, human rights and the E.U. I think this is probably the reason why Mr. Musk is among the invited guests who have confirmed their presence.”
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Elon Musk has been widely criticized for allowing the proliferation of anti-Semitic posts, as well as outright lies about Israel during the ongoing war in Gaza, on his Twitter social media platform. Musk has argued that he is concerned with freedom of speech so he does not wish to censor the posts on Twitter. But his critics have argued that as the operator of the world’s most used messaging platform through which countless people around the world receive news updates, he has a moral obligation to do something about its use for hate speech.
And Elon Musk has himself agreed with anti-Semitic posts on Twitter.
One such 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. 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.”
To that Elon Musk responded, “You have said the actual truth.”
Eon Musk previously tried to offset the perception that he is anti-Israel by visiting the country last November. During the trip, Musk was also given a personal tour of the areas in southern Israel destroyed in the barbaric October 7 terrorist attack. He was also shown a video of the atrocities committed by Hamas during the attack.
Prime Minister Netanyahu and Elon Musk toured Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where the Prime Minister showed him the horrors of the massacre at the kibbutz on Saturday, October 7th. They also went to the Leibstein family residence where Musk heard about the heroism of the late Ofir Leibstein, the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council Chairman who was murdered on the morning of October 7th in exchanges of fire with terrorists who had entered the kibbutz.
Elon Musk seemed to have been moved by what he saw during the day, saying that it was, “certainly an emotionally difficult day, to see the places where people were murdered. And also to watch the video where the murderers are rejoicing. Celebrating the murder of innocent people is extremely disturbing.”
Musk also seemed to acknowledge that he needs to do more to stamp out the proliferation of hate speech on Twitter.
“We have to do whatever is necessary to stop the hate,” he told President Herzog. “Essentially these people have been fed propaganda since they were children. And it’s remarkable what humans are capable of if they’re fed falsehoods, from when they are children, they will think that the murder of innocent people is a good thing. That is how much propaganda can affect people’s minds.”
