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OPINION: Is Anyone Scarier than Elon Musk?
The specter of Musk as a government “efficiency czar” should give us all pause.
By Nadine Epstein
Elon Musk deserves all the praise he gets for disrupting and reinventing complacent industries. Indeed, he has overseen the revolutionizing of rockets (SpaceX), the streamlining of electric car production and the building of robots (Tesla), the development of an implantable brain-computer interface capable of translating thought into action (Neuralink), and the creation of a satellite internet network (Starlink) that no country can rival. Yet he is someone we decidedly do not want in government, be it as an efficiency czar advising on what federal programs to cut or in any other position, not even as an ambassador.
Before I tell you what it is that brings me to this position, let me enumerate what it’s not.
I’ll start with one of the elephants in some of the rooms where I spend time. In them are many people who consider Musk a shameless antisemite. Even before he bought his favorite social media platform—Twitter, now X—he posted and reposted a wide assortment of conspiracy theories to his massive following. He engaged with antisemitic accounts and occasionally flirted with outright antisemitism in his own posts.
In 2023, he went head-to-head with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), repeatedly blaming the Jewish group for a significant decline in X’s advertising revenue, evoking the long history of antisemites using Jews as scapegoats. The rift between X and the ADL, the highest-profile American organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism, was mended, but after a requisite apology tour of Auschwitz, Musk has merrily gone on with his injudicious endorsements of content that is sometimes antisemitic but more often just plain off the wall. (I don’t want to rehash all the X-Lord’s many online antics, but one that sticks in my craw is how he plays right into antisemitic tropes by lashing out against his fellow billionaire George Soros. Any invocation of Soros in this climate reeks of antisemitism, subtle or not, and it drives me nuts that a Holocaust survivor, now 94, has become the modern Jewish caricature and punching bag.)
All this said, I don’t think Musk is a true antisemite. Rather, he is a man who is particularly vulnerable to conspiracy theories, of which antisemitism is the foundational theory. This vulnerability, according to Walter Isaacson in his 2023 book Elon Musk is something Musk inherited from his father, Errol Musk. Now 78 and estranged from Elon, Errol is a lifelong rearranger of facts. By 2021, according to Isaacson, “He was a full-throated denier of COVID vaccines, Trump’s election loss and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
Isaacson details how Errol later wrote to Elon that “the Left (or gangsters) have got to be stopped. Civilization is at stake.” Errol, however, is not Elon’s only ancestor with a conspiratorial bent. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who was raised on a farm in the central Canadian plains, was the chair of the national council of a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which Isaacson describes as having a “conservative streak tinged with antisemitism.” The group’s “first leader in Canada decried ‘a perversion of cultural ideals [caused by the] disproportionate number of Jews occupying positions of control.’”
Musk cannot be tarred with his ancestor’s errors in judgment, but what is clear is the ease with which Musk can be corralled by and used by antisemites and other trolls, as a person and as the owner of a powerful social media platform, which he considers a modern-day public square. True antisemites are consistent in their Jew-hatred; they don’t shift with the wind as Musk does to further whichever whim or need is front and center at the moment.
You might still find the position that Musk isn’t an antisemite, voiced by the Jewish editor-in-chief of a magazine read largely by Jews, controversial or disputable, and if so, I understand. But let’s set aside the is-he-or-isn’t-he-antisemitic question, because it’s not the reason why I feel so strongly that Musk should never serve in government.
It’s also not because he owns X and has more than 200 million followers there. It’s not because he disparages the media or that he’s bent on colonizing Mars and needs Trump in the Oval Office to do it. It’s not that he admits to an empathy deficit or even that he’s a billionaire. It is because…
SELECT INCIDENTS
Polish police investigate a sign reading “Jews to the gas” hung outside a Krakow university building that anti-Israel students have occupied for more than six months.
A man in Ramapo, NY, calls for an ambulance but requests “no Jewish” medics when the ambulance arrives and responders are visibly Jewish.
Dublin City Councilor Punam Rane apologizes after saying Israel and Jews control the U.S. economy.
READ FULL ANTISEMITISM MONITOR REPORT
Q&A: With University of Miami Demographer Ira M. Sheskin
By Jennifer Bardi
Ira M. Sheskin
The director of the Jewish Demography Project has authored more than 50 studies of Jewish communities across the country. His latest is “Antisemitism in the United States: The Impact of October 7,” which surveyed 1,075 Jewish Americans about their experiences with antisemitism over the past year.
Q: In your survey you asked if antisemitism would impact the way people usually vote—43 percent said it would. Referring to the upcoming election, 17 percent of that segment said “I usually vote Democratic, but will now vote Republican” and 9 percent said “I usually vote Republican but will now vote Democratic.”
A: The 17 and 9 percent are from the 43 percent. In terms of all Jewish adults, it’s 7.3 and 3.9 percent, respectively. You have some Democratic Jews who are going to vote for Trump because of antisemitism, you have some Republicans who are going to vote for Harris because of antisemitism. This is less than a 4-point difference, so I wouldn’t make a big deal over this.
Q: But there’s a narrative out now that Jewish voters in Pennsylvania could actually have a substantial effect on the outcome of the election.
A: There are about 350,000 Jews in Pennsylvania, which is 2.7 percent of the population. If a state is going to be won by 10,000 votes, and there are 350,000 Jews in the state, yes, convincing X number of Jews to switch from Democrat to Republican could have a significant effect.
Q: The Republican Jewish Committee recently put out an ad in which three Jewish women sitting in a deli booth say they usually vote Democratic but are voting for Trump because “he’ll keep us safe.”
Looking at your survey, these voters clearly exist—as do the fears about antisemitism the ad is tapping into. Is it fair to say the fears about antisemitism far exceed the experiences of antisemitism (not to downplay the experiences)?
A: Like many, I went to my synagogue on the High Holidays. And you’re sitting there seeing that they’ve doubled the guard duty. Yes, there is a lot of fear out there. I do wonder though how these Jews think that voting for the person who emboldened the antisemites is going to bring down the level of antisemitism. Boggles the imagination. It took Trump two years to fill the position of special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism that Deborah Lipstadt now holds. Basically, his attitude was, we don’t need this. Trump was the first to issue a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that didn’t have the word Jew in it. (Of course, Jews weren’t the only victims of the Holocaust, but it was aimed at the Jews in particular, right?)
Don’t [those voters] realize that the Biden administration is the one that has, in fact, dealt seriously with this issue? That, with Doug Emhoff, it launched a National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism? What Trump did was simply let people who have antisemitic feelings come forward and express them, and some of them have done so violently.
Q: I’ve heard from some Jewish people, Democrats, who think the ad is antisemitic. How so?
A: I think it’s the stereotypes they’re using. The older women in that ad sound like my grandmother, who’s been dead for 40 years. They sound like Eastern European Yiddish speaking Jews. I think the ad’s creators did that on purpose, but that’s not the way most Jews outside of the ultra-Orthodox talk.
A Wide-Open Conversation
with Senator Ben Cardin and Amy E. Schwartz
“One of the lessons that we’ve learned over our history as Jews is that you can’t let these things ever become normalized. The rise of antisemitism is dangerous today, including in the United States…Leaders need to make clear that there is no place in our community for these types of behaviors. Not just senators and presidents—if you’re head of the PTA in your community, you’re a leader. You’ve got to speak out against any form of hate.”
—Ben Cardin, U.S. Senator from Maryland
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