Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January
Essential brief
Many social media posts by Tesla CEO on his platform are indiscernible from those of white supremacists, say experts
Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying.
The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output.
The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.
Musk’s posts included him repeatedly claiming white people face systemic discrimination, endorsing the conspiracy that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in countries around the world and promoting a claim that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority. “If you stripped Elon Musk’s name off of these things and showed them to me, I would think that this was a white supremacist,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Extremism, who reviewed a selection of the posts.
Musk has for years promoted anti-immigrant and far-right content in his posts, as well as endorsed rightwing activists and political parties around the globe.
The Tesla CEO’s most recent output displays a more consistent and explicit engagement with white supremacist content and nativist activists than in the past, however, lending them the imprimatur of the world’s richest person and spreading their ideas to his audience of over 200 million followers.
Beirich said he appeared “deep into the world of white nationalism”. “The White ‘liberal’ standard for behavior is extremely strict, but is only applied to Whites,” Musk said on 26 January, commenting on a post that claimed there was discrimination against white conservatives.
Musk’s posts repeatedly echoed prominent white supremacist narratives and ideologies, said William Braniff, the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s office for prevention of terrorism and extremism.
Several of Musk’s posts included what Braniff described as “textbook examples” of white supremacist conspiracy theories such as “the great replacement” – a belief that liberal elites or Jewish people are conspiring to use immigration to replace white populations.
The danger of Musk’s obsession lies in mainstreaming ideas that are deeply tied to violence and discrimination, according to Braniff, who is now executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (Peril) at American University. “The great replacement has been an especially important mobilizing narrative for highly lethal white supremacist attacks in the United States and elsewhere,” he said.
Musk has repeatedly denied he is racist or antisemitic, stated that he condemns terrorism and said he does not advocate for violence.
He asserted in a 2024 interview with Don Lemon that he does not subscribe to “great replacement theory”.
He also told Joe Rogan in March last year that he is not a Nazi, weeks after facing condemnations from Jewish groups and the chairman of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel over his speech to Germany’s far-right AfD party in which he told Germans to move beyond their “past guilt”.
Musk offers a platform for the far-right Although Musk wrote a number of posts on race and immigration himself last month, much of his output involved reposting far-right activist accounts or replying to them with brief endorsements such as a bullseye emoji, implying agreement.
On 10 January, Musk replied “yes” in reply to a post from a white nationalist account that claimed “race communism that destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa are the same things they are bringing to America and the rest of the Occident to turn us into the Global Favela”.
The author of the post previously published a blog titled How To Build An American Orania – a reference to the privately owned, whites-only town of Orania in South Africa.
Similar interactions took place throughout the month.
After a far-right influencer posted “they just want to eradicate White people it’s that simple” in reference to the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration speech, Musk replied on 7 January “some people really do”.