The battle raged on Saturday, November 18, on Wikipedia, to qualify Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, founder of Space X and owner of X (formerly Twitter). “Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman, investor and far-right conspiracy theorist”, we could provisionally read on the English version of the encyclopedia. The person concerned criticized the qualifier, describing the encyclopedia as “wokipedia”, a play on words on the “wokism” which he loathes. In reality, this definition is more than ever on the agenda since Elon Musk approved an anti-Semitic tweet on Wednesday, November 15 and triggered an outcry in the United States.
A libertarian born in South Africa under apartheid, Elon Musk drifted towards a hatred of Democrats and progressives and now finds himself on the borders of the conspiratorial and anti-Semitic far-right. “Elon Musk insists he is not an anti-Semite. But last week, the billionaire entrepreneur left many people perplexed », modestly writes the Wall Street Journal, who carried out a long exegesis of the tweets of the owner of The definitive observation is summarized in the title: “How Elon Musk, for many, went too far”.
The conflict arose on Wednesday, November 15 when a user of the platform posted on about homophobic and anti-Semitic posts on Twitter since Elon Musk took control. The statistics were based on information from New York Times and the Anti Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish association fighting anti-Semitism, which called in 2022 to stop advertising on Twitter due to the anti-Semitic remarks made there.
Chain of tweets
The screenshot is a year old, but Elon Musk is off to a quick start, Wednesday at 4:06 p.m., against an association that he accuses of having wanted to kill X: “They should really drop the ‘A’ and go with the Defamation League. Much more precise.” In the following hours, analyze the Wall Street Journalwe see Elon Musk’s anger rising in the “demonic mode” described by his biographer Walter Isaacs.
At 4:52 p.m., Musk therefore approves an anti-Semitic tweetposted a little earlier, which claims that “Jewish communities advocate the exact type of dialectical hatred against white people that they claim they want people to stop using against them”. At 6:29 p.m., Musk targets the ADL again: “The ADL unfairly attacks the majority of the West, although the majority of the West supports the Jewish people and Israel”. An X user takes it: “it is not fair to say nor truthful to say that “Jewish communities” promote dialectical hatred toward white people. Say what you want about the ADL, but don’t generalize the Jewish community.”
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