The trip came after Musk’s social media platform, X, came under fire for antisemitic content. Some of the platform’s biggest advertisers have either paused their ad spending or left the platform altogether in response to Musk describing a post by another user that many perceived to be an antisemitic conspiracy theory “the actual truth.”
The advertiser exodus deepened after the watchdog group Media Matters released a report showing ads from major companies appearing next to posts on X in support of Nazism. IBM, Apple and Disney were among the big names who pulled their ads.
Musk later apologized for the post and called it the “dumbest” one he had ever made.
Musk and Shapiro visited the former Nazi concentration camp site with Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, Musk’s three-year-old son, and European Jewish Association (EJA) Chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin. The EJA challenged Musk to visit the site a few months ago in a Zoom conference focused on antisemitism in social media. More than 1.1 million people were murdered there by Nazi Germany during World War II; a million were Jews, and 200,000 were children and young people.
“It was incredibly moving and deeply sad and tragic that humans could do this to other humans,” Musk said about the visit. “I’m a student of history, so I had seen the pictures, I’d seen the videos, but ... it hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person.”
Musk claims he is "aspirationally Jewish"
He then gave a speech in nearby Krakow about the rise in antisemitism that has been seen since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
He added that he had been “naïve” about antisemitism up until recent times because the majority of his friends are Jewish.
He told Shapiro: “In the circles that I move, I see almost no antisemitism. And, you know, there’s this old joke ‘I’ve got like this one Jewish friend.’ No, I have like two-thirds of my friends are Jewish. I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I’m like Jewish by association, I’m aspirationally Jewish.”
In November, Musk traveled to Israel, where he proclaimed that he was against antisemitism and anything that “promotes hate and conflict” – an ironic statement for someone who was standing in a country that continues to kill countless civilians in response to the October 7 assault by Hamas.
He toured Auschwitz under the banner of “Never Again,” yet Israel has been carrying out an extensive campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people of Gaza. There is no denying that the Holocaust is one of the darkest and most horrific chapters of modern history, but murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, including children and babies, in Gaza while cutting the enclave off from food, water and electricity is not much better. Not content to stop there, they also cut off supplies of crucial medications and other medical supplies, forcing doctors to perform complex surgeries like amputations without anesthesia in some cases to try to save people’s lives.
The situation has grown so horrifying that the country was accused of genocide by South Africa in a case before the International Court of Justice, but apparently Musk doesn't care about who is promoting "hate and conflict" when it's against the Palestinian people.
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