Fallout from Musk’s endorsement of anti-Semitic post spreads

San Francisco – Fallout from an Elon Musk post that endorsed anti-Semitic views spread on Thursday, prompting outrage from an investor in his electric vehicle company Tesla Inc.

Hours earlier, a major advertiser said it would pull ads from X over pro-Nazi content on the Musk-owned blogging site.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, also chief executive of project-management software maker Asana Inc, called on the billionaire to resign.

Dr Kristin Hull, founder and CEO of Nia Impact Capital, a social-impact fund that owned about US$282,200 (S$380,000) of stock in Tesla as at midyear, said she was “appalled” after Mr Musk endorsed a post on X that attacked members of the Jewish community for pushing “dialectical hatred” against white people.

Mr Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s richest person with a net worth of around US$218 billion, has repeatedly drawn fire for promoting hate speech and content attacking Jewish people at a time of rising anti-Semitism. He courted controversy again on Wednesday when he responded to the post: “You have said the actual truth.”

Dr Hull said in an e-mail on Thursday: “The impact of erratic, racist and anti-Semitic speech from a CEO directly affects Tesla’s brand and bottom line in significant ways. This behaviour has the power to tarnish the brand long term.”

She added that the lack of “serious punitive action” from Tesla’s board is also concerning, since Mr Musk’s behaviour violates the company’s code of business ethics. Nia Impact Capital suggests an appropriate response to his actions would include “censure by the board, demotion, reassignment, suspension or removal”.

Media Matters released a report on Thursday showing ads for IBM, Apple Inc, Oracle Corp, Comcast Corp’s Xfinity brand and the Bravo television network, which is owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, running on X next to pro-Nazi posts. International Business Machines Corp said it was suspending advertising on the social media platform formerly called Twitter.

“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination, and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” a company spokesman said in an e-mail, citing the Media Matters report.

Comcast is looking into the matter, a spokesperson said. Apple and Oracle did not respond to requests for comment. IBM’s decision was reported earlier by the Financial Times.

Mr Moskovitz said X CEO Linda Yaccarino should ask Mr Musk, who serves as the company’s chief technology officer, to resign. “Yaccarino faces her biggest test yet as she decides whether to terminate her anti-Semitic CTO or risk losing even more advertisers,” he wrote on Threads, another social media site. “How will she handle this tricky, yet morally unambiguous situation?”

A representative for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg