Early on Friday, Elon Musk shared a post written by an X user about the actions of three 20th century dictators — then quickly deleted it after it sparked a backlash.
The post falsely claimed that Joseph Stalin, the communist leader of the Soviet Union until 1953; Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party in Germany; and Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people under their watch. Instead, the post said, their public sector workers did.
Mr. Musk shared the post without any other comment. He removed it soon after users on X criticized the post, saying it was antisemitic and dismissive of genocide. Historians have widely chronicled that millions of people died under Stalin, that millions of Jews were massacred under Hitler during the Holocaust, and that millions of Chinese were displaced or killed during Mao’s cultural revolution.
It was the latest post by Mr. Musk to devolve into controversy. In 2023, Mr. Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on X as “the actual truth” of what Jewish people were doing, prompting advertisers to flee. And after an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump last year, Mr. Musk wrote — then deleted — a post suggesting it was odd that nobody had tried to kill former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. or former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Musk has long appeared to favor strongmen and has promoted right wing modern-day leaders. He has repeatedly used X to support politicians like Javier Milei of Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Narendra Modi of India, leaders in countries where he also has business interests. Most recently, he threw his support behind the hard-right Alternative for Germany party, hosting an online town hall for its candidate for chancellor.
“It is deeply disturbing and irresponsible for someone with a large public platform to elevate the kind of rhetoric that serves to undermine the seriousness of these issues,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement about Mr. Musk’s sharing of the post.
Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk frequently uses X as a megaphone to share everything from juvenile memes to major U.S. policy proposals, blasting his opinions to his more than 219 million followers. But his viewpoints are drawing more scrutiny since he has become a close adviser to President Trump helping overhaul government spending.
Mr. Musk has transformed X, removing many rules around hate speech and disinformation and allowing thousands of accounts banned by the company’s prior leadership for problematic posts to return to the platform — including Mr. Trump’s.
Around 2:30 a.m. on Friday, Mr. Musk shared the post written by an X user that said, “Stalin, Hitler and Mao didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.”
Mr. Musk in recent weeks has battled with public sector workers in Washington as part of his work with his cost-cutting initiative, known as the Department of Government Efficiency. He has accused federal workers of trying to conceal fraud and encouraged them to quit their jobs.
The post sparked backlash from federal employee unions, among others.
“America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich. They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers,” Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement.
Mr. Musk on Friday shared several comments on X defending himself from accusations of antisemitism and claiming his critics were the ones aligned with Nazism. Mr. Musk also recently came under fire for a making a gesture that resembled the Roman salute, which is also known as the “Fascist salute” and was later adopted by the Nazis.
“Look at what they did to President @realDonaldTrump,” Mr. Musk wrote in one post. “He was loved by democrats until he ran for president. Now they call him Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc and try to kill him,” referring to another dictator, the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.