Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of social-media platform X, is no longer a speaker at the 2023 APEC CEO Summit in San Francisco. It wasn’t immediately clear why his name was removed from the agenda, but the change came after Musk backed a claim that Jewish communities are pushing hatred against whites.
Musk had been scheduled to co-host a session with
Salesforce
(CRM) CEO Marc Benioff on Thursday afternoon called “a conversation on AI and the Future,” according to the agenda of the summit. But early in the day, Musk was replaced with John Kerry, the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, according to the organization’s website.
In a statement Thursday afternoon, the APEC CEO Summit said: “Elon Musk had a schedule change that prevented him from joining the APEC CEO Summit 2023. We’re thankful for his offer to join the session remotely, however it was agreed among all speakers that participation would be in person.“
Musk didn’t return a request for comment.
Late Wednesday afternoon, an X user who goes by the name “The Artist Formerly Known as Eric” wrote in part: “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Musk wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter): “You have said the actual truth.”
Later Wednesday evening, Musk posted pictures from San Francisco. In another post on X, he wrote that the term decolonization “necessarily implies a Jewish genocide, thus it is unacceptable to any reasonable person.”
He added that he doesn’t believe all Jewish communities hate whites, but he claimed the Anti-Defamation League “unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on Thursday criticized Musk’s recent remarks in his own post on X. “At a time when anti-Semitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote anti-Semitic theories,” Greenblatt wrote while directly referencing one of Musk’s tweets.
Musk and the Anti-Defamation League have been at loggerheads since the organization released a report saying anti-Semitic hate speech surged on X after Musk took it over. In September, Musk threatened to sue the ADL for defamation, saying its reports have discouraged companies from advertising on the platform.
On Thursday, Tesla stock dropped 2.7% in early afternoon trading. The
S&P 500
was down 0.4% and
Nasdaq Composite
was flat.
Coming into Thursday trading, Tesla stock had been riding a four-day winning streak that took shares up about $33, or 16%, from about $210 to $243 apiece.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
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