Elon Musk was condemned by his industry peers for cosigning an antisemitic post on X, formerly Twitter. Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook cofounder and the CEO of productivity software maker Asana, this week called for Musk to resign from not only X, but also his other companies after Musk replied “You have said the actual truth” to a user’s post claiming Jewish communities are “pushing hatred” against white people.
The post also claimed Western Jewish people are supporting “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, drawing a commonly used idea from a white supremacist conspiracy theory that non-white populations in the U.S. and other Western countries are trying to outnumber and replace the majority white populations.
“I call on Elon Musk to resign,” Moskovitz wrote a now-deleted post on Threads on Nov. 15. He later posted that Musk should resign “(from everything),” referring to Musk’s other businesses, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI.
Musk is the owner of X, but he doesn’t hold any executive titles at the company. In another post on Threads yesterday (Nov. 16), Moskovitz also called out X CEO Linda Yaccarino, appointed by Musk in June, saying she needs to decide whether to fire Musk or lose more advertisers on X.
Other prominent figures in the tech industry, including Tesla investors Ross Gerber and Kristin Hull, have also made statements condemning Musk’s response. Gerber said on X yesterday he’ll be replacing his Tesla with a Rivian. In an interview with NBC the same day, Gerber said Musk is “destroying everything he’s built.” Hull told Bloomberg in an email that the “impact of erratic, racist, and antisemitic speech from a CEO directly affects Tesla’s brand and bottom line in significant ways.”
Yaccarinio responded on X that the company’s “point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board.”
This is not the first time Yaccarinio has had to defend X after Musk is accused of antisemitism. In September, following Musk’s unsavory comments about the Jewish nonprofit Anti-Defamation League, she wrote a company blog post titled “Our ongoing commitment to combat antisemitism on X.” Critics have called out Yaccarino’s responses for failing to acknowledge Musk when he was the reason she needed to make such a statement.
Musk has ongoing beef with the ADL, which works to combat antisemitism. He threatened to sue the organization in September based on his belief that it had discouraged advertisers from working with X. The previous month, X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a research nonprofit, over the similar issue, claiming that it created a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the X platform.”
