Elon Musk: I will tweet what I want even if it loses me money
Elon Musk has said he will continue sending controversial tweets even it loses him money, as he defended himself against accusations of antisemitism over tweets about George Soros.
The Twitter owner and Tesla chief executive said he is “allowed to say what I want to”, as he defended a tweet posted on Tuesday saying the billionaire financier “reminds me of Magneto” – the Jewish villain in the X-Men series.
In an interview with US broadcaster CNBC on Tuesday, he said: “I’ll say what I want to say and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
<p lang=«en» dir=«ltr» xml:lang=«en»>Soros reminds me of MagnetoSoros was born into a Jewish family in Hungary in the 1930s and survived the Nazi occupation of his birth country, while the backstory of Magneto, from a German Jewish family, portrays him as a concentration camp survivor.
Soros is a regular target for rightwing conspiracy theorists in attacks that are often flagged as thinly veiled antisemitism.
Musk also continued his attack on Soros in replies to his tweet. Brian Krassenstein, a US journalist, responded that Soros is “attacked nonstop for his good intentions”, to which Musk replied: “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said Musk was feeding “antisemitic tropes” and would “embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies”. Musk has nearly 140 million followers on Twitter and brushes with controversy regularly in his posts.
<p lang=«en» dir=«ltr» xml:lang=«en»>Soros often is held up by the far-right, using antisemitic tropes, as the source of the world’s problems. To see @ElonMusk, Read more on theguardian.com
