Elon Musk and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting Monday began with the world leader recalling how he once told his wife that the owner of X Corp. (formerly Twitter) “really knows what he’s talking about. I said, ‘He’s the Edison of our time.’” It only got worse from there.
The meeting was streamed live on X on Monday as part of the prime minister’s stateside swing ahead of the U.N. General Assembly. The fact that Netanyahu’s stop in San Francisco to meet Musk was part of a diplomatic trip only bolstered the conception of Musk as a de facto world leader, whose decisions are of geopolitical import. Officially, the topic of conversation was artificial intelligence: Unofficially, it was an opportunity for both men to clear their names, and provide a missing piece of credibility that only the other could provide.
Musk met the prime minister’s empty request with a similarly empty response.
As the stream continued, viewers could see the two men sitting side-by-side in large white armchairs in a dark room that could’ve been anywhere in the world. Every so often, you’d hear a cough from off camera, the only sign that other human beings were present. The pair appeared fittingly isolated.
The meeting came in the midst of Musk’s very public campaign to turn the millions of users of his social platform against the Anti-Defamation League — an explicitly Jewish organization — by blaming them for the massive drop in X’s ad revenue. He linked digital arms with white nationalists and promoted the hashtag #BantheADL, fomenting a mob that needed little encouragement to blame everything on the Jews.
But when a spokesperson for Netanyahu, one of the most visible Jews in the world, announced last week that he’d be meeting with Musk, there was little reason to believe the prime minister would admonish the CEO. Netanyahu has previously expressed a fondness for Musk. Even after Musk said in May that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization” — a clear reference to antisemitic conspiracy theories about Soros — Netanyahu’s team defended Musk.
“As Israel’s minister who’s entrusted on combating anti-Semitism,” Amichai Chikli, Israeli minister of diaspora affairs and social equality, tweeted, “I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and role model. Criticism of Soros — who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!”
Netanyahu predictably echoed this sentiment during Monday’s summit. “I know your commitment to free speech. I respect that, because I think it’s an integral part — it’s the foundational thing of democracies, really,” he told Musk with a straight face. “But I also know your opposition to antisemitism. You’ve spoken about it, tweeted about it, and all I can say is that I hope you can find within the confines of the First Amendment the ability to stop not only antisemitism, or roll it back as best you can, but any collective hatred of the people that antisemitism represents, and I know you’re committed to that.”
Musk has been openly hostile toward the idea of softening his language when speaking about Jews.
Musk met the prime minister’s empty request with a similarly empty response. Anyone who hoped for new commitments to fight antisemitism on social media got “All Lives Matter” rhetoric instead. “Generally, I mean, I’m sort of against attacking any group. You know, it doesn’t matter who it is,” Musk said. “I’m in favor of that which furthers civilization and which ultimately leads us to become a spacefaring civilization, where we understand the nature of the universe. So we can’t do that if there’s a lot of infighting and, you know, hatred and negativity. So, you know, obviously I’m against antisemitism. I’m against anti, really, anything that promotes hate and conflict.”
Far from Musk’s “opposition to antisemitism” being common knowledge, as Netanyahu suggests, Musk has been openly hostile toward the idea of softening his language when speaking about Jews. “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” Musk told CNBC in May. In recent days, he’s continued to share conspiracy theories about the ADL. And just hours before Musk was set to meet with Netanyahu, he tweeted, “The Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.” Musk and Netanyahu’s meeting is the definition of adding insult to injury: Not only did the Jewish leader meet with a man who has proudly mainstreamed antisemitic conspiracy theories, but he did so during the most holy week in the Jewish calendar, between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and the beginning of Yom Kippur. Netanyahu gave Musk a free pass for his antisemitism in the name of some nebulous commitment to working together on AI. And perhaps most astonishingly, the meeting said the quiet part out loud: Both men are more committed to fights with their ideological foes than they are to the global safety of the Jewish people. Former President Donald Trump expressed a similar commitment when he posted to his social network Truth Social in the waning hours of Rosh Hashanah: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward! Happy New Year!” And in response, Netanyahu has said nothing. Because he agrees.
Marisa Kabas
Marisa Kabas writes about politics, media and gender and their many intersections. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, HuffPost and The New Republic, and she writes a newsletter called The Handbasket. She is based in Brooklyn, New York. 
