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Elon Musk attends The 2022 Met Gala Celebrating “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 02, 2022 in New York City. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

Elad NehoraiJune 8, 2023

“I’m not trying to compare this s*** to Aum Shinrikyo or even Rwanda but I’m gonna be totally honest with you Elad, I’m scared scared this time.”

I got this text from my friend Sarah Hightower, an independent researcher who specializes in the far right and online extremist movements. I had been spending a year warning people about Elon Musk’s increasingly overt antisemitism, but I wanted to know if she felt his most recent Twitter interaction was as alarming as I thought it was.

Musk replied to an initial tweet that uses the word “Js” to refer to Jews, while referencing a modern blood libel conspiracy theory about the chemical compound adrenochrome, which alleges that “global elites” torture children to extract the chemical from their blood for the purpose of maintaining their health and youth.

At no point in Musk’s response did he call out this blatant antisemitism. As is common for him when interacting with bigotry, Musk responded obliquely, referencing Mel Gibson’s physique while ignoring the substance of the tweet. While this could theoretically be construed as an oversight, Musk consistently finds himself chatting it up with Twitter’s best-known antisemites; what happened this week was just more explicit.

Musk’s history of amplifying antisemites and antisemitic rhetoric on Twitter, along with his control of the social media platform itself, make him the loudest, and most powerful antisemite in American history.