Elon Musk’s – Elon Musk became the first person described as reaching the “four-comma club” after SpaceX went public on Friday, but major profiles of his milestone largely bypassed a record the piece links to racism and conspiracy theories. From posts after Paul Pelosi’s 20
On Thursday. a large inflatable figure of Elon Musk stood in Times Square in New York—an unmistakable signal that the world’s richest man had reached a new tier of wealth. The next day. the headlines moved even higher: SpaceX went public on Friday. and Musk was celebrated as the first human to enter the “four-comma club.”.
But praise for the milestone didn’t linger on one crucial thread the newsletter insisted should be impossible to ignore: that Musk, in its telling, has spent years amplifying racism, antisemitic tropes, and conspiracy narratives that repeatedly inflamed political and social tensions.
The newsletter pointed back to October 2022, when Paul Pelosi—the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—was brutally assaulted at their San Francisco home. It says Musk spread an article from an obscure website claiming the assailant was a male prostitute and that the attack stemmed from a drunken dispute between Pelosi and this man. The newsletter quotes Musk’s post on Twitter: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye. ” and it notes that the site Musk referenced had reported in the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was dead and had been replaced by a body double.
Then came August 2023, after Musk rebranded Twitter as X. The newsletter says Musk began pushing a bogus theme: that White South Africans were the victims of genocide. It claims he kept pushing the idea in subsequent years. It also says that last year. the Grok AI chatbot on X told users—unprompted—that South African “whites are targeted due to racial motives. ” and it points to fact-checking that concluded the claim was false. It adds that Trump “would champion this BS claim” as a way to suggest white people are the real victims of racism.
The newsletter also ties Musk to antisemitic amplification. citing an August 2023 post comparing Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros to the Marvel supervillain Magneto. It says Musk contended that Soros hates humanity and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.” The newsletter says those anti-Soros messages were broadcast to Musk’s roughly 125 million followers and were “widely excoriated” as advancing antisemitic tropes.
In November 2023, the piece recounts another moment that drew heavy backlash. It describes a response to an X user who declared that Jews encourage hatred of white people and that by supporting immigration Jews “don’t like the United States too much.” It says Musk replied. “You have said the actual truth.” The newsletter adds that the reply drew more than 6 million views and triggered widespread censure for what it characterizes as apparent endorsement of antisemitism.
The newsletter then folds in what it calls election-related paranoia. It says Musk endorsed conspiratorial suspicions about voting machines and repeatedly boosted the false charge that US elections are largely fraudulent due to widespread voting by undocumented immigrants. It also says Musk embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
That distrust, the piece argues, is tied to other conspiratorial content as well. It says Musk posted a message in the days after the antisemitism backlash that appeared to legitimize the long-debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory—that Democratic officials and others had run a child sex-trade ring out of the basement of a Washington. DC. pizzeria that. the newsletter says. did not have a basement.
Another recurring theme in the newsletter is Musk’s role in the anti-DEI crusade and its alleged denigration of Black people. In January 2024, it says Musk argued that diversity programs at United Airlines and Boeing made air travel less safe. It describes a post responding to an X user who suggested the IQs of United Airlines pilots who attended historically Black colleges and universities were lower than those of Air Force pilots; Musk wrote. “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE”—which the newsletter notes as a misspelling of the DEI acronym. It adds that Musk also wrote. “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?. That is actually happening,” and says that post received 14 million views within hours.
During the 2024 campaign. the newsletter says Musk helped promote a racist. false accusation involving Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Ohio—asserting they were stealing and eating people’s pet cats and dogs. It says Musk amplified memes spreading the claim and refers to an inauguration rally for Trump where Musk made a stiff-arm gesture compared to a Nazi salute. followed by a joke.
The piece also describes Musk’s involvement beyond US politics. It says Musk endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party days after that inauguration moment. characterizing some scholars’ views of AfD as fascist. It says Musk addressed an AfD rally remotely. telling attendees that there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. ” a remark the newsletter says was interpreted to suggest too much attention was paid to the Holocaust.
The newsletter widens further to Northern Ireland. It says earlier this month Musk used X and his own posts to stoke anger that has led to horrific anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland. It ties that influence to Musk’s support for Tommy Robinson. describing Robinson as a British anti-immigration extremist proponent of the white replacement theory. It adds that Robinson has been credibly accused of racism and that Musk bankrolled Robinson’s legal defense against terrorism charges last year.
It then turns to what it frames as the consequences of destroying US institutions. The newsletter says Musk’s successful effort to destroy USAID has resulted—so far—in an estimated 263. 000 deaths among adults and 518. 000 deaths among children overseas. It puts USAID’s annual budget at about $28 billion. and it argues that one trillion dollars could have funded it for 35 years to combat starvation and disease in poor nations and support programs to detect and contain deadly infectious diseases that could spread to the United States.
The piece calls Musk a “maniacal detractor” of USAID. saying he blasted the agency as “evil” and “a criminal organization.” It describes USAID as the kind of institution that spent tens of billions of dollars annually to fight starvation and disease. and to help detect and contain infectious diseases. It treats the estimate of deaths as the starkest human measure of what it says has been lost.
It also makes a broader claim about the state of public discourse. The newsletter says Musk has poisoned the national conversation and cites several studies finding an increase in racist and antisemitic speech on X after Musk took over. along with a drastic cutback on content moderation. It adds that Musk has “lots of blood on his grubby hands—100 million ounces or so. ” if the estimate it references is correct.
Even with the inflatable image in Times Square and the celebration of a new wealth milestone. the newsletter’s central point is that the record matters. It argues Musk’s “attainment of Big-T status” should not distract from those alleged transgressions and that he deserves condemnation instead of celebration.
The ending is bleak on purpose. The newsletter says Musk is “the only trillionaire we have and by far the worst,” then closes by asking how a capitalist system produced, as its first trillion-dollar-man, “such a dangerous lout and hatemonger.”
Elon Musk SpaceX USAID antisemitism conspiracy theories DEI election misinformation AfD Tommy Robinson X Grok AI Nancy Pelosi Paul Pelosi