Musk on visiting Auschwitz: ‘It will take a few days to sink in’
Elon Musk and his son Techno Mechanicus at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp Jan. 22. Photo by Yoav Dudkevitch
By Jacob Kornbluh January 22, 2024
Billionaire Elon Musk, who has been accused of tolerating and promoting antisemitic posts on X, the social media platform he owns formerly known as Twitter, visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on Monday. He made the trip with Ben Shapiro, the popular Jewish conservative pundit.
“I’m still absorbing, frankly, the magnitude of the tragedy that I witnessed,” he said at a roundtable discussion shortly after his visit. “It will take a few days to sink in.”
Musk also said that had social media been around at the time, the Holocaust “would have been impossible to hide.” (Word of the camps did get out at the time of the Holocaust, but many chose to ignore it.)
Musk brought his three-year-old son, Techno Mechanicus, to Auschwitz, and was accompanied by Rabbi Menachem Margolin of the European Jewish Association, and Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev. Calling himself “aspirationally Jewish,” Musk laid a wreath at the wall of death and took part in a short ceremony and service at the Birkenau memorial.
Musk is in town for the EJA annual conference in Krakow Monday and Tuesday ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.
In a conversation with Shapiro, Musk said he will never be able to ensure that antisemitism on his platform will be cut to zero, but boasted X has “the least amount of antisemitism” when compared to any other social media platform. “TikTok has like five times the amount of antisemitism,” he said.
Margolin, who heads the Brussels-based organization EJA, invited Musk to tour Auschwitz “to walk there, to feel it, to understand it” during a livestreamed event on antisemitism and free speech in September on X. Musk, who at first seemed to reject the invitation, saying that he had seen pictures of concentration camps and was well informed about the Holocaust, later in the discussion responded with a “tentative yes.” He said he was heading to the region anyway.
After visiting on Monday he said: “It hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person.”
The online discussion and invitation in September followed a feud between Musk and Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, which demanded that he cease allowing neo-Nazis and others to air antisemitic views on X. They also lambasted him for his own seeming endorsement of antisemitism on the site. Musk in turn blamed the ADL for scaring away advertisers and a $4 billion loss in revenue. Corporations including Disney and Universal paused advertising on X after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post.
“To fully understand why we Jews are so worried about antisemitism, a visit to Auschwitz is a necessary and life-changing experience,” Margolin said.
Musk on X has promoted a QAnon conspiracy theory, quoted Nazis, engaged with antisemites, and compared George Soros, the Jewish billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, to the X-Men comic book villain Magneto. X also reportedly paid a Holocaust-denying account $3,000 in ad revenue.
The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum reported in August that X rejected the museum’s complaint about Holocaust deniers who tweet vitriolic, antisemitic messages. Officials at the museum said they’re seeing “much more antisemitic and denial content published” on the platform than in the past.
Musk visited Israel in November and toured the southern Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Aza, a Hamas target in the Oct. 7 massacre. He was joined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had called him “a person whose intelligence and contribution to humanity I greatly appreciate.” On Monday Musk said he advised Israelis to take several steps to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: killing or imprisoning Hamas fighters, reforming the education system so that children are not taught to hate, and perform “conspicuous acts of kindness” to the Palestinian people. “Even if they try to bite your hand when you do it, keep doing it,” he said. Musk compared it to the Marshall Plan after World War II.
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