Elon Musk doesn’t think he’s an antisemite for his series of tweets earlier this week that compared George Soros to Jewish supervillain Magneto.
“I’m like a pro-semite, if anything,” Musk said.
It was one of several bizarre moments from the billionaire’s chummy interview with CNBC’s David Faber Tuesday following Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting. Faber asked Musk about a slew of his recent controversies, including his persistent denial that the Allen, Texas mass shooter had white supremacist views.
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“Ascribing it to white supremacy was bullshit,” Musk said. “There’s no proof that he is [a white supremacist.] … We should not be ascribing things to white supremacy if it’s false.”
A social media account from the shooter, which was filled with neo-Nazi and white supremacist rhetoric, suggests otherwise. But Musk continues to deny the account’s validity because it was discovered by Bellingcat, an investigative news organization that Musk said is “a company that does psyops.”
Numerous other news organizations, including The Daily Beast, have since confirmed the shooter’s ties to white supremacy and neo-Nazism. “We do know he had neo-Nazi ideation,” Texas Department of Public Safety Regional Director Hank Sibley said of the shooter earlier this month, while confirming that he also had Nazi tattoos.
Musk continues to cast doubt, and has reportedly limited Bellingcat’s reach on Twitter after the public spat.
Twitter occupied a bulk of Musk and Faber’s conversation Tuesday, with Musk at one point admitting that he probably shouldn’t have fired so many employees after acquiring the social media giant for $44 billion last year.
“There’s no question that some of the people who were let go probably shouldn’t have been let go,” he said. “We certainly did not have the time to figure out—we had to make widespread cuts to get the run rate under control.”
Musk cut about 80% of Twitter’s staff, bringing it from just under 8,000 people to about 1,500 since taking over the company in October 2022. Now, Musk says they need workers.
“We absolutely need to hire people,” he said. “And if they’re not too mad at us, probably rehire some of the people that we let go.”
Musk also shared his vision for the platform, which he described as “a cybernetic collective mind for humanity” through self-moderation and community notes. Infamously, he’s also a frequent user of the app—Faber asked him if that ever gets him into business trouble.
Musk responded with a quote from The Princess Bride:
“Offer me money. Offer me power. I don’t care.”
