Elon Musk Gives Antisemites a Chance to Rewrite History
Musk is once again courting antisemites — this time, to help him revise our collective history.
Elon Musk announced recently that he plans to use his AI system, Grok, to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge”, an Orwellian task which he quickly outsourced to his X followers, asking them to contribute “divisive facts for Grok training.” These facts, he said, should be ”things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
Almost immediately, Musk‘s followers started responding with a variety of alternative facts – a.k.a. falsehoods – that they believe should become our new reality, including disinformation about vaccines, gender identity, and climate change.
But it didn’t stop there.
Before long, the replies to Musk’s tweet started filling up with Holocaust deniers hoping to write the Holocaust right out of history and erase the millions of Jews who were murdered in the mass extermination plot.
“The Holocaust has been greatly been greatly embellished,” one user wrote.
“The Holocaust is a largely an exaggeration,” another account posted.
Some were even less subtle with their Holocaust denial, like one user who stated bluntly: “The Holocaust never happened.”
But by far the most common response to Musk from Holocaust deniers was the claim that 6 million Jews were not really killed during the Holocaust, and that the number was closer to 271,000. This figure comes from a widely circulated and intentionally misrepresented document that lists the total number of death certificates issued at 13 concentration camps, but does not reflect the total number killed during the Holocaust.
There were “well over 1,200 sites of imprisonment and murder throughout Nazi Europe,” according to a Full Fact analysis. Per the most comprehensive figures to date, approximately 2.7 million Jews were murdered at killing centers specifically set up to exterminate Jews; 2 million were killed in mass shooting operations; 800,000 to 1,000,000 were killed in ghettos, concentration camps, and labor camps; and at least 250,000 more were killed in violence outside of detention facilities. There is no single document or register that lists all of the Jews and other persecuted minorities who were murdered during the Holocaust, but 70 years of painstaking archival research has produced estimates that scholars around the world agree are accurate. Furthermore, both early research and more recent efforts to calculate the total death toll have resulted in estimates of five to six million.
When many people think of Holocaust denial, they think it is limited to denying that the event itself ever happened, but that’s a misconception. Holocaust denial actually occurs on a continuum and includes a variety of conspiratorial beliefs, all of which are centered around claims that Jews are exaggerating, misconstruing, or lying about history.
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Holocaust denial is discourse and propaganda that deny the historical reality and the extent of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices [and] may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people.”
Attempts to deny or refute the accuracy of the death toll and other details about the Holocaust like the methods of extermination and the intention of the perpetrators are among the most common forms of Holocaust denial, serving as somewhat of a gateway into even more harmful antisemitic conspiracy theories and denialism. The idea is that if you can get people to start questioning things on the margins, then you can get them to start questioning the more central facts later. Furthermore, since outright Holocaust denial is generally still socially unacceptable, introducing it through a side door is thought to make it more palatable to some people.
It’s not exactly surprising that Musk’s call to his followers resulted in such an onslaught of Holocaust denial in the replies. After all, this isn’t Musk’s first foray into flirting with antisemitism. In November 2023, Musk appeared to endorse a post espousing beliefs consistent with the antisemitic white genocide conspiracy theory, which posits that Jews are orchestrating a global plot to replace the white population by supporting mass immigration, population control measures, and other policies associated with demographic changes.
Since taking over Twitter (now called X), Musk has also largely failed to address antisemitic content and pro-Nazi accounts, which have greatly increased in number under Musk’s ownership.
More recently, in January 2025, Musk issued a dog-whistle to anti-semites when he told members of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that "there's too much focus on past guilt” — a statement that most people interpreted as a reference to the historical burden Germany carries for the Holocaust. Around that same time, Musk fired off a series of antisemitic “jokes” and puns on X just days after making a gesture at a Trump inauguration rally that sure looked a lot like a Nazi salute.
Leaders of Jewish groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs have condemned Musk’s behavior, calling him a “shameless and unrepentant antisemite.”
At the very least, Musk apparently sees no problem in courting antisemites and giving them an opportunity to help rewrite history from their perspective — a perspective that seeks to erase 6 million dead Jews from our collective memory.