Fallout from an Elon Musk post endorsing Anti-semitic views continues to spread, prompting a rebuke from the White House and criticism from Tesla Inc. investors as advertisers flee his social media platform, X.

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White House adds voice to growing backlash over Elon Musk’s endorsement of anti-Semitic post Back to video

Musk, who regularly engages with anti-Semitic users on X, agreed with a post that said Jewish people hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people. “You have said the actual truth,” Musk said.

The White House called Musk’s response an “unacceptable” act that endangers Jewish communities. Meanwhile, several Tesla shareholders also spoke out against Musk, who is the chief executive of the electric car maker, with some saying he should be suspended from his post.

Americans have “an obligation to speak out against anyone who attacks the dignity of their fellow Americans and compromises the safety of our communities,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement on Friday. Musk’s companies hold several government contracts.

Musk’s remarks add to backlash sparked by a report from Media Matters released Thursday showing ads for International Business Machines Corp., Apple Inc., Oracle Corp., Comcast Corp.’s Xfinity brand and the Bravo television network running on X next to pro-Nazi content. IBM said it will stop advertising on X until the situation is resolved. The European Commission also said it would pull ads on X but would continue using X to post news items and other information.

Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. announced Friday it was suspending all advertising on X, effective immediately, a company spokesman said by email.

“X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat anti-Semitism (sic) and discrimination,” X chief executive Linda Yaccarino said on the platform Thursday. “There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”

Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Inc. and the world’s richest person, has repeatedly been criticized for promoting content attacking Jewish people and his latest comments come at a time of rising anti-Semitism and Isalmophobia around the world amid the Israel-Hamas war. The Anti-Defamation League found anti-Semitism on X increased by more than 900 per cent in the week following the initial Oct. 7 attack by Hamas compared to the previous week.

Last year, the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy organization, called on Musk to apologize after he deleted a controversial tweet that made a satirical comparison between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Adolf Hitler.

“I’ve just never had this with any company I’ve ever invested in, ever in my life, where the CEO of the company himself does so many detrimental things,” Ross Gerber, co-founder and chief executive of wealth-management firm Gerber Kawasaki Inc., said on CNBC on Thursday. “It’s destroying the brand.”

Musk has accused the ADL, a Jewish civil rights group, of undermining X’s advertising revenue by highlighting a rise in extremist content that has caused advertisers to flee. Ad sales on X are down 60 per cent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers” mounted by the ADL, Musk said in September, after the organization said reports of harassment and extremist content spiked since he took over the company.

In September, Musk met with Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu at Tesla’s offices in Fremont, California, for a broadcast discussion and said, “obviously I’m against anti-Semitism. I’m against anti-anything that promotes hate and conflict.”

At the end of the long and wide-ranging conversation, Musk shared that he had attended a Jewish school while growing up in South Africa and could even sing “a great ‘Hava Nagila,’” a Jewish folk song.

Kristin Hull, founder and chief executive of Nia Impact Capital, said she was “appalled” by Musk’s new posts. The social-impact fund owned about US$282,200 of Tesla stock as of mid-year and has waged pressured campaigns against the company for years, including via shareholder resolutions.

“The impact of erratic, racist, and anti-Semitic (sic) speech from a CEO directly affects Tesla’s brand and bottom line in significant ways,” Hull wrote in an email Thursday. She said an appropriate response to Musk’s actions may include censure by Tesla’s board, demotion, reassignment, suspension or removal.

Tesla shares fell 3.8 per cent on Thursday and were down less than one per cent in New York on Friday.

The European Commission advised staff to stop advertising on X due to “an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech,” it said in a statement on Friday, which didn’t specifically cite Musk’s posts. The move was initially reported by Politico.

Media Matters released a report Thursday showing ads for IBM, Apple Inc., Oracle Corp., Comcast Corp.’s Xfinity brand, and the Bravo television network, which is owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, running on X next to pro-Nazi posts.

“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” a company spokesperson said.

Comcast is looking into the matter, a spokesperson said. Apple and Oracle didn’t respond to requests for comment. IBM’s decision was reported earlier by the Financial Times.

X did a sweep on the accounts that Media Matters found associated with the offensive content and they will no longer be monetizable, Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at the company, said in a statement. The specific posts will be labelled “Sensitive Media.”

The X system is not intentionally placing a brand actively next to this type of content, nor is a brand actively trying to support this type of content with an ad placement, Benarroch said.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, also head of project-management software maker Asana Inc., said Yaccarino should ask Musk, who serves as the company’s chief technology officer, to resign.

“Yaccarino faces her biggest test yet as she decides whether to terminate her anti-Semitic (sic) CTO or risk losing even more advertisers,” he wrote on Threads, another social media site. “How will she handle this tricky, yet morally unambiguous situation?”

— with assistance from Todd Shields, Jillian Deutsch, Craig Trudell and Ed Ludlow

Bloomberg.com