Elon Goes to Auschwitz

And a Good Grift Was Had By All

Credit: U.S. Airforce

On 22 January, the world’s second richest man paid a  visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some two million people visit Auschwitz every year.   These visitors have included some high-profile celebrities, from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Katy Perry, to Oprah Winfrey and Wayne Rooney. Nothing wrong with that. You can be rich and famous and still go to Auschwitz with good intentions.

But there were no such intentions behind the much-covered pilgrimage of tech billionaire Elon Musk to the world’s most infamous concentration camp, as an invited guest of the European Jewish Association (AJA). It was on one hand a grubby, and - given the object of his visit - scandalous exercise in self-promotion, which also demonstrates how low some of Israel’s supporters are prepared to sink to achieve their aims.

First of all, let’s take a closer look at the EJA’s illustrious invitee. In May last year, following a spike in migrant arrivals at Lampedusa, Musk compared George Soros to the Marvel villain Magneto in a tweet that accused the billionaire philanthropist of  wanting ‘ to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity’ – an unproblematic recycling of the racist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory with blatantly antisemitic undertones that can frequently be found coursing through various white nationalist and neo-Nazi fora. 

Since Musk took over Twitter/X, messages like this have been all over the platform, and Musk has done nothing to stop them. He has on occasion amplified them, most notoriously on 15 November last year, when someone calling himself ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Eric’ tweeted the following:

To which the world’s second richest man replied:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) were among those who condemned Musk for such tweets. As a result advertisers began leaving the platform in droves – resulting in a 60 percent drop in advertising revenues by September.  In response, Musk called the CCDH ‘evil’ and its CEO a ‘rat’, and claimed that he was being persecuted:

In Musk’s world - and he’s hardly alone in this - he is always the victim, no matter what stupid, evil utterances he comes out with. And because he is the world’s second richest man, there are always those willing to cut him some slack. On 17 November, two days after Musk’s ‘dialectical hatred’ exchange, the self-styled ‘free speech absolutist’ announced that pro-Palestinian expressions such as ‘decolonization’ and ‘from the river to the sea’ would be banned from his platform.

To which the ADL’s director Jonathan Greenblatt, no less, responded

Notice how Greenblatt accepts Musk’s assertion that these banned slogans ‘necessarily imply genocide’ and constitute ‘clear calls for extreme violence.’

Musk’s willingness to ‘show leadership’ on such matters did not go unnoticed in Israel itself. On 27 November, Musk was accompanied by Netanyahu on  a tour of the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas.  Musk agreed with Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel had ‘no choice’ but to get rid of the ‘poisonous regime’ in Gaza, ‘as you did in Germany, as you did in Japan.’

Musk also agreed not to allow his Starlink internet communications system to be used in Gaza without Israeli consent, which, in addition to his control of X/Twitter, also explains why he was given the red carpet. To paraphrase an old American expression, Israel seems to have taken the attitude that Musk may be an antisemite, but he’s our antisemite.

All of which brings us to Auschwitz, where Musk was accompanied by Ben Shapiro – the ultra-Zionist ‘conservative’ commentator famous for his vicious disavowals of Palestinian rights, and insightful observations such as ‘Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.  This is not a difficult issue.’

More recently, Shapiro mocked Rachel Corrie - a woman crushed by an Israeli bulldozer for trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian house - as one of the ‘great idiots of history.’ These were the two humanitarians who the European Jewish Association invited to walk Auschwitz together. And Musk took the invitation seriously, so seriously that he brought his three-year-old son ‘X’ - yes that really is his name - with him, even though the Auschwitz administration recommends that under 14-visitors should not visit the camp, and advises visitors to ‘observe the appropriate solemnity and respect’.

Musk observed the appropriate solemnity and respect by posing in front of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign with his son on his shoulders - one for the family album for sure. And after the visit – cue lots of moody shots of Rocket Man gazing moodily into the moody overcast sky, barbed wire fences, huts etc, the EJA staged a conversation between Musk and Shapiro in Krakov.

Before it began, the EJA’s chairman, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, showed a slideshow of fantasy ‘tweets’ posted during World War 2 about the mass murder of Jews, in order to make the dubious argument that these events might not have happened had social media existed at the time. Margolin then he presented Musk with a little sculpture made from a Hamas rocket found in an Israeli kindergarten with the words ‘Never Again’ welded onto the tail.   

Some context here: In 2019, Margolin criticized an EU ruling that Israel was ‘in breach of humanitarian law’ as ‘the worst kind of fiddling while Rome burns’ and accused the EU of ignoring Hamas rockets. In fact the EU condemned  the ‘utterly unacceptable’ rocket fire on Israeli civilians as well, but it also criticized Israel, and as the world has learned again and again, there is only one side in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ that can ever be criticized and condemned.

Margolin clearly belongs to that category, and it is not clear what Musk had done to earn this ‘award’, beyond actually condescending to show up. But the symbolism could not be clearer: Hamas is an extension of the Holocaust and Israel’s response to the assault/pogrom on 7 October is an extension of Never Again.

Did Musk appreciate this? When Shapiro asked for his responses to what he had seen, Musk replied that he was a ‘student of history, so I’ve seen the pictures and the videos’, but it nevertheless ‘hits you much more in the heart’ to see the actual place where these things occurred.  Naturally Musk agreed that Nazism could not have happened if social media had existed because ‘it would have been impossible to hide.’ Musk also suggested that  if ‘there’d been freedom of speech’, it would have stopped the rise of Nazism, because the Nazis banned free speech after taking power. 

These shallow claims do not bear much scrutiny. Fortunately for Musk, there was no scrutiny at all, as he went on to boast that he had so many Jewish friends that he was therefore ‘Jewish by association’ and ‘aspirationally Jewish’. 

No one asked what it meant to be ‘aspirationally Jewish’. When Musk laughed and said ‘Am I Jewish?  Look, I’m Jewish,’ Shapiro laughed with him.   These are the kind of jokes you can tell after a visit to a death camp where nearly a million Jews were murdered, and if you are the world’s second richest man, you will always find people who will laugh with you.

Because he had so many Jewish friends, Musk claimed that he had been ‘naïve’ about not recognising antisemitism. It was not until he saw the ‘pro-Hamas riots that took place in nearly every major city in the West’ that Musk realised the seriousness of the situation. There have been no such ‘riots’ in any city in the West, but there have been many pro-Palestinian and pro-ceasefire rallies and protests. None of them have been pro-Hamas, though a minority of participants in some of them have expressed pro-Hamas messages. 

Such nuances did not matter to Shapiro, the EJA, or Musk.  Instead Shapiro pontificated about the ‘conspiracy theory of antisemitism’, which he described as and a ‘conspiracy theory about power.’  This is true, but it has has nothing to do with Shapiro’s subsequent argument that movements calling for diversity and equality are a continuation of antisemitism, because they directed against ‘people at the top who are successful’ in other words…people like Musk.

Musk heartily, telling his audience

Diversity, equity [sic] and inclusion – always be wary of any name that could come out of a George Orwell book.  That’s never a good sign.  Because diversity, equity and inclusion, these all sound like nice words, but what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and it’s against merit, and that I think is fundamentally antisemitic.

So here was a man accused of recycling antisemitic white supremacist conspiracy theories, telling his audience that attempts to end racial and sexual discrimination are inherently antimeritocratic and antisemitic. This shallow dialogue continued like this, as Musk and Shapiro exchanged half-digested lumps of history, smears, strawmen arguments, and tendentious propositions.  

At one point,  Shapiro got to the elephant in the room, and suggested to Musk that ‘Legacy media have spent a lot of angst on you, they’ve made a lot of attempts to paint you as antisemitic, X as antisemitic. Where do you think that’s coming from?’

As Jodie Foster would say in True Detective: wrong question.  Shapiro might have asked why the Center for Countering Digital Hate has  accused Musk of ‘making brazen verbal and legal threats against CCDH, all the while allowing racist, antisemitic content to proliferate on his platform.’

He could have pointed out that one of the foremost Jewish advocacy organizations in the world believes that Musk’s changes to Twitter have empowered a host of far-right extremists who ‘regularly share hateful and conspiratorial content as well as links to more extreme spaces, creating a potential radicalization pipeline that could help these toxic ideologies spread’.

He could have addressed the claims made by Andrew Torba, the former CEO of the disactivated rightwing extremist Gab platform - where the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue killer allegedly posted - in May last year:

Shapiro could have asked who ‘our largest enemy’ was, and why Musk had allowed Korba’s ‘guys’ back onto the platform to wage ‘total war’. Instead he and Musk agreed that the ‘legacy media’ was jealous of truth telling platforms like Twitter/X, and that this was why Musk had been targeted. The historian Guy Walters, who was in the audience, has written that Musk ‘hoodwinked’ everyone present, Jews and Jews alike.

On the evidence of what I saw, this was a game in which everyone played everyone else. Musk used the visit and the discussion to buff up his tarnished brand, and effectively committed himself to recycling Israeli messaging about Hamas and Gaza, in the name of fighting antisemitism. Shapiro had his own self-importance and inane talking points about the decline of the West and diversity agendas reaffirmed by the world’s second richest man.

This is the kind of thing you might expect on the Joe Rogan show or a Jordan Peterson podcast. But to do this at Auschwitz is a sordid abdication of moral decency by all concerned. On the same day that Musk staged his faux-pilgrimage/reflection, 195 people were killed and 354 injured in Gaza.  All this is known all over the world.  None of it is hidden. And Musk’s visit to Auschwitz was another attempt to galvanize support for the slaughter and shame those who oppose it into silence.

That same week, Musk announced that his Neuralink company had succeeded in planting a microchip in the brain of a monkey.   Perhaps the world’s second richest man should insert a chip into his own brain, preferably with a conscience attached to it. 

And the same could be said about some of his fellow-participants, who used the memory of the most terrible genocide in history, for reasons that have little to do with fighting the very real threat of antisemitism in the 21st century, and much more to do with the annihilation of Palestinian society that is unfolding in front of our eyes.