Elon Musk got visibly angry in a message to big advertisers who pulled their ads from X (formerly Twitter) due to a post deemed to endorse antisemitic conspiracy theories, Variety reported.
Elon Musk's DealBook Summit tirade
During the New York Times' DealBook Summit, Musk said, “Go f**k yourself… Go. F**k. Yourself. Is that clear?”
One of the companies that pulled ad spending from the social media platform was Disney. Its CEO Bob Iger addressed this earlier in the same event, “I have a lot of respect for Elon and what he has accomplished.”
However, Disney, and effectively, Iger, still went ahead and disassociated themselves from X and said that “the position [Musk] took, in a quite a public manner” was “not necessarily a positive one for us.”
In response, Musk said that if Disney “is going to try and blackmail me with advertising” then they shouldn't.
“Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience, that’s how I feel — don’t advertise,” he stated.
Musk and X are currently dealing with the mass departure of major advertisers such as Disney, Comcast, Discovery, IBM, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal and Sony. The post in question was of an X user who promoted the conspiracy theory that Jews “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
The now removed post continued that the user stated they were “deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations” who are facing “hordes of minorities that support flooding their country.”
To which Musk replied, “You have said actual truth.”
This prompted the White house to condemn his response as an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.” Activist group Media Matters took an interest and found ads were side by side with pro-Nazi and white supremacist posts.
However irate Musk initially was, he did end up admitting that he “should not have replied to that particular person.”
He continued, “I essentially handed a loaded gun to those who hate me.”
When DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin interviewed him on stage, Musk said, “I have no problem being hated… hate away.”
He did end up clarifying his X post. His point, he said, was that persecuted groups funded by Jewish organizations calling for attacks on Jewish people was a wholly illogical situation.
Musk insisted that he is not antisemitic. What he was saying was that “it's unwise to support groups that want your annihilation. If anything, I am philo-Semitic.”
He also clarified that his trip to Israel, hosted by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wasn't “an apology tour.”
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