Elon Musk recently claimed on Twitter that George Soros “hates humanity” and now he’s refusing to back down from that attack, standing by it during a recent interview.Here’s how that conversation went:
REPORTER: “Elon, you tweeted this thing about George Soros…”
MUSK: “I’m reminded of a scene in ‘The Princess Bride’ — great movie — where he confronts the person who killed his father. And he says, ‘offer me money, offer me power. I don’t care.’”
REPORTER: “So, you just don’t care.”
MUSK: “I’ll say what I want to say and if the consequences of that are losing money, so be it.”
REPORTER: "Elon, you tweeted this thing about George Soros…"
MUSK: "I'm reminded of a scene in 'The Princess Bride' — great movie — where he confronts the person who killed his father. And he says, 'offer me money, offer me power. I don't care.'"
REPORTER: "So, you just don't… pic.twitter.com/kFoIysT8fm
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 16, 2023
For reference, the Musk-Soros controversy started when Musk tweeted, “Soros reminds me of Magneto.” He later followed that up by saying, “I’d like apologize for this post. It was really unfair to Magneto.”
That’s when a journalist, Brian Krassenstein, tried to defend Soros and said, “Fun fact: Magneto’s experiences during the Holocaust as a survivor shaped his perspective as well as his depth and empathy. Soro, also a Holocaust survivor, get’s attacked nonstop for his good intentions which some Americans think are bad merely because they disagree with this political affiliations.”
Musk didn’t back down there either. Instead, he said, “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”
Predictably, that got the Anti-Defamation Leauge very mad. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, said that Musk’s tweet “will embolden extremists.”
“Soros often is held up by the far-right, using antisemitic tropes, as the source of the world’s problems,” Greenblat tweeted. “To see Elon Musk, regardless of his intent, feed this segment — comparing him to a Jewish supervillain, claiming Soros ‘hates humanity’ — is not just distressing, it’s dangerous: it will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.”
Musk then fired off two tweets in reply. In the first, he said, “Hey stop defaming me,” probably a joke because he was dealing with the Anti-Defamation League. In the second, he said
Similarly, Fox News Channel’s leftist host Jessica Tarlov freaked out about Elon’s comments, saying, “You can make criticisms of [Soros]. But when he gets up there and he tweets that he is like Magneto, the Marvel villain who also was a Jewish person who survived the Holocaust, and then he says, ‘Soros hates humanity,’ and then ‘The Jews’ starts trending, you know exactly what you’re doing if you’re Elon Musk.”
Continuing, she added, “It’s beneath the genius of Elon Musk to be that petty and that lame.”
Jesse Watters, responding, said, “They usually interview CEOs, investors, tech analysts. This guy is a software developer and innovator. Usually, when you interview a businessman, he doesn’t share his opinion. He’s not gonna say or do anything that’s going to affect the bottom line. Elon’s brain is not like that. Elon is a creator. He is trying to put people in outer space. He doesn’t care about political correctness. This guy is about logic and that’s why, in all of his companies, he’s the creative force.
