“Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did,” said an X post shared by the site’s owner, multibillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Since he re-posted it from the account “Rothmus” – itself a screenshot of another post from a user called Alice Smith – Musk has, not surprisingly, been met with backlash. He seemed to comment on it Thursday with another re-post, this time from the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley account.
“If Elon Musk is such a Nazi, why are the Top officials of Israel buying Teslas?” it asked, along with a photo of a news article showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing with Musk in front of a Cybertruck from Telsa, a company Musk is CEO of.
Regardless, the three dictators mentioned in the quote Musk shared – Nazi leader Adolph Hitler, Chairman Mao Zedong of China and Joseph Stalin of the former Soviet Union – were indeed responsible for millions of deaths, as USA Today noted. Hitler alone is responsible for the deaths of more than 6 million Jewish people.
According to the U.S. National Archives, Hitler and the Nazis “set a course… to systematically plunder the Jewish wealth of Germany,” beginning in 1933. In the 1940s, the Nazis began deporting Jewish people into ghettos and exterminating them, as authorized by Hitler, per the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Until Germany surrendered in May 1945, it had acquired vast amounts of territory, property, and financial wealth, and Hitler’s plans for ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ resulted in the death of over 6 million Jews and countless other millions,” said the archives.
This isn’t the first time Musk has been linked with Nazism. What’s notable about this incident is its apparent reference to his work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
President Lee Saunders of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees said this of Musk’s re-post: “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. Elon Musk and the billionaires in this administration have no idea what real people go through every day. That’s why he’s so willing to take a chainsaw to people’s jobs, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.”
President Donald Trump created the new DOGE department shortly after he was inaugurated in January. Since then, DOGE has made headlines for massive cuts to the public sector, and it claims to have saved the government $115 billion, though that claim has been disputed. Cuts have included putting U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) workers on administrative leave and have been met with protests, lawsuits and concerns.
For example, Audacy recently reported on how the DOGE layoffs have harmed several veterans. Rolling Stone reported this week that cuts to the National Parks have created an elevated wildfire risk as Los Angeles, Calif., is still in recovery from wildfires that ruined parts of the area.
“We’ve got Elon Musk doing a lot of things domestically, which I had some difficulties with on a Constitutional level and a contract level, Andy Smith, director of the University New Hampshire Survey Center, told Audacy in a recent interview.
With DOGE constantly in the headlines, people began boycotting Tesla and the company’s stock plummeted so hard that Musk lost an estimated $16 billion in a single day. He seemed to laugh it off in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow.
Musk has played with antisemitic tropes on X platform before. In April 2023, CNN reported that he had “publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among white supremacists: that Jewish communities push ‘hatred against whites.’” Later that year, Newsweek reported that: “A series of high-profile Jewish organizations have slammed Elon Musk’s Twitter for not responding proactively to antisemitic content on the platform.”
This January, NBC News reported that the “chairman of Israel’s official Holocaust memorial has accused Elon Musk of insulting the victims of Nazism and endangering Germany’s democratic future after the billionaire addressed a rally for Germany’s far-right party.”
According to the report, Musk made a surprise virtual appearance at a campaign event for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. During the appearance, he said “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” in an apparent reference to the country’s Nazi history.
Musk also made headlines in January for what many interpreted as a Nazi salute. At that time, the Anti-Defamation League – a nonprofit focused on combating antisemitism around the globe – said that it seemed to be just an “awkward” gesture. They did not give Musk the benefit of the doubt regarding his re-post this week about Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
“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,” said the ADL. Musk has more 219 million followers on X.