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Condemning Elon Musk is easy. Quitting him would be very hard, especially for the US government, which is stuck in a needy relationship with the billionaire who went from endorsing crackpot conspiracy theories to endorsing antisemitic tropes.
NASA needs his rockets. The Pentagon needs his satellites. The government needs for electric vehicles to access his network of chargers. Officials need his social media platform – Twitter, now called X – to communicate with people.
On Friday, the White House joined the uproar over Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X. “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” spokesman Andrew Bates said Friday. If you want to read the entire statement, Bates posted it on X.
The statement is in line with the uproar over Musk’s forwarding of the antisemitic trope. A large number of companies, including CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, have said they will suspend advertising on X.
There have been calls for Musk to be suspended from the publicly traded company, which he bought for $44 billion last year and then gutted of its safeguards against misinformation and hate speech.
On Monday, the White House announced it would be joining X rival Threads, which is owned by Meta, as backlash to Musk intensifies.
The New York Times smartly points out that while the views Musk shared are abhorrent to the White House, the government’s national security apparatus and space programs are essentially “addicted” to Musk’s SpaceX.
“Rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single, if petulant, technologist with views…
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